


i know you [i walked with you once upon a dream]

by qqueenofhades



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/M, garcy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-28
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-09-27 14:11:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10024232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qqueenofhades/pseuds/qqueenofhades
Summary: Post-1x16 canon divergence. When Lucy Preston, a history professor at Stanford University, is visited by a strange man who tells her that her entire world is a lie, she is drawn into a mystery more dangerous than she could have dreamed, and a hunt for a past she can't remember. But who, or what, is she going to find -- or lose -- along the way?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a post on tumblr by twilight-deviant, about if how if Flynn had gone back and saved his family in 1x16, he’d return to a reality where none of the adventure had happened, the Time Team didn’t know each other, and Lucy didn’t know him. I am utter Garcy trash, so there will be a lot of that, but also some Lyatt and Rufus/Jiya along the way.

**February 20, 2017**

**Palo Alto, California**

Lucy Preston pushes through the office door with her hip, because her arms are full of books, binders, half-marked papers, a catalogue from the bridal shop that Noah wants her to take a look at, and her purse, car keys, and the memo she just picked up from the front desk at the history department. Her tenure meeting has finally been scheduled, six weeks from now. Trust the chucklefucks to give her a short deadline, but she’s had most of this prepared for the past two years anyway. University politics are always a merry-go-round of emailing people, emailing the people they put you in touch with, pestering them to answer their email, emailing them to answer their email, and then discovering at the last minute that the class they timetabled you in for the fall is, _whoops,_ happening in spring instead, and so forth – but Lucy feels vindicated. She’s been working for this her whole career, and now it’s finally happening. She just hopes Mom hangs on long enough to see it – and for that matter, her wedding. The last reports from the doctor, well… the words “end of life care” and “memorial arrangements” came up. This is a lot, but Lucy thinks she’s handling it. Most days.

She dumps the avalanche on her desk and boots up her computer, sifting through the stack of papers with her free hand. Logs onto her stanford.edu email, where there are 125 unread messages waiting. It’s only been a weekend, but for some reason it feels as if she’s been away much longer. She woke up feeling strange this morning. Broke down in the shower, for no reason. Noah was comforting, said it was just nerves, expected with everything – the wedding, her mom, tenure worries. Probably was.

Probably was.

Lucy frowns, then shakes herself. Deletes the spam from the fraudster academic publishers and the nineteen thousand “Campus Events” circulars, politely replies to the dozen students in her lecture who somehow cannot find the reading (the book is _in the bookstore,_ or likely available free online as a pirated .pdf), debates whether to send her half-dozenth email to the tiny local archive in Illinois that she’s been bugging to let her into their Lincoln papers (she can probably wrangle a minor research stipend from the department – enough to cover a plane ticket, at least), and decides that no, she is definitely not brave enough to check her bank account. Tries to calculate whether the due dates for various bills have passed – internet, phone, gas, car insurance – and no academic gets into it for the money. As a junior professor, she’s definitely not making it rain, and Noah’s not making gigabucks as a doctor just yet either. Especially in this real estate market. The two of them, with their combined professional incomes, can just about afford to rent a nice closet. Lucy was – still is – living at her mom’s house a lot, but she really needed somewhere to escape to. Her own place. It feels like she needs to get away.

She’s just vainly hoping she may have time to do some actual research this morning, before she has to run to the library and print out her lecture handouts for tomorrow, when there’s a knock on her door. “Dr. Preston?”

“Yeah?” Lucy says, opening up her PowerPoint to make the edit she thought of last night washing the dishes. “Office hours aren’t until 1pm, can you – ”

“Sorry.” It’s one of the grad assistants. “There’s someone who wants to see you. Out in the foyer. Do you have a meeting this morning?”

“No, I don’t.” Lucy frowns. “Are you sure they’re looking for me?”

“They – well – he – seemed pretty sure. Lucy Preston, history and anthropology of American political movements, 450 Serra Mall, Building 200, Stanford University. I asked him if he was doing a project or something and he said no. Do you know a Flynn? Garcia Flynn. I think he’s European.”

“No,” Lucy says again, unsettled and confused as to why she had a momentary impulse to say yes. She isn’t exactly a big enough fish in the academic world to have people randomly turn up begging to consult her or take advantage of her expertise, and they usually email in advance anyway. It’s possible she lost it among the nightmare of her inbox, yes, but this is still strange. This also isn’t the kind of profession where you get crazy fans. Unless he saw her article in the _American Historical Review_ in January, and just had to drive all the way out to Palo Alto to tell her how much he liked it (or hated it, you never know).

This is all weird, is the point, and it isn’t helping Lucy’s strange disjoint. But while the smart thing to do would be to insist that Garcia Flynn, whoever he is, is mistaken and send him packing on his way, she hesitates, then decides that the handouts can wait. She doesn’t have anything last-minute on her plate, and her curiosity is piqued. She logs out, puts her computer to sleep, and follows the graduate assistant out into the sunny hall.

Garcia Flynn, or so she assumes he is, is standing correctly at attention like a soldier on parade, watched intently by a few of the student services officers. The first thing Lucy notices is that he’s tall – six-three, six-four – and dark-haired, with a strange, intent stillness like the world moves differently around him. He’s wearing a black suit and tie and a black overcoat, making him look like he came from a convention of either morticians or accountants, and he turns with an odd expression on his face. “Lucy.”

“I’m sorry.” He’s not holding out his hand as if he expects to be introduced, and Lucy doesn’t offer hers either. “Do we know each other?”

He smiles, half to himself, as if that is either a funny question, or the worst thing he’s ever been asked. “We used to.” His accent is, as the GA said, European of some sort. Foreign intelligence service? Or domestic? Lucy doesn’t _think_ she qualifies as an enemy of the state, but then again, with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in office, maybe they’re cracking down on the academics now. “Recently.”

“I… I don’t think so, sir.” Lucy feels further unsettled – and yet, though perhaps she should, not afraid. “I’ll be happy to point you to whoever in the department you’re looking for, but I don’t think that’s – ”

“Can we meet for coffee? This afternoon, if you’re free. I promise, one hour of your time, that’s all I ask. Then I’ll be gone, and you never have to see me again.” He has an unsettlingly direct way of looking at her. “I would very much appreciate it, Lucy.”

“I…” Innate politeness, the impulse to say, _yes, of course, let me check my calendar,_ wrestles with the fact that this is completely inexplicable. But if nothing else, historians love a good mystery. It’s possible he’s planning to duct-tape her and throw her into the back of a van, but he probably wouldn’t ask straight out if he was, or plot to stage her abduction in a busy public place. “I suppose I can spare an hour. I’m free for the rest of the morning. Campus Starbucks?”

“Wherever you want.” He inclines his head. “Thank you.”

Lucy pauses, then goes to get her coat. She didn’t have time to grab breakfast this morning, so if nothing else, it will be a decent opportunity to get a bite to eat. If he does turn into a kidnapper, she can scream; security services will take care of the rest. She pulls it on, locks her office, and gestures to him. “Right, come on.”

They take the elevator down and step out onto campus, which is busy with its usual currents of students, bicycles whizzing by; one of them nearly rides into Lucy, and Garcia Flynn reaches out automatically to grab her arm, pulling her back. It’s a surprisingly forward gesture from a man she met five minutes ago, and Lucy disentangles herself. “I’m fine. I’ve got this.”

He pauses, considering her. Almost as if he’s looking for something, testing for some kind of reaction. Then he nods again. “Yes,” he says. “I suppose you do.”

They reach the Starbucks and join the typically lengthy midmorning queue, finally order their drinks – he pays, which is considerate of him, since he dragged her out of her workday and all – and jostle through the tables to find an unoccupied one in the corner. By now, Lucy would really like some answers. “Are you some kind of government agent? For… I don’t know who? I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done, but if so, I want a law – ”

He utters a short, dry laugh. “If I was interrogating you, Lucy, I assure you, I would not have bought you a latte and a croissant beforehand.”

“So are you? Government?”

He shrugs. “Do I look like it?”

“You look like something.”

He shrugs again, as if to say that he supposes he can’t deny that. He drinks a single espresso, straight, black and strong. “It would take too long to explain what I am.”

“Try me.”

Again, that look he gives her, straight to the back of her head. Then he turns and pulls the _San Francisco Chronicle_ off the newsstand, opening it and pointing to an article about Mason Industries, one of the thousand high-tech aeronautics engineering companies around here. There’s a group picture, something they’re launching. Second from the left, a black guy with a gap-toothed grin and a MIT sweatshirt. According to the caption, he’s Rufus Carlin, project consultant. “Do you,” Garcia Flynn says, “know him?”

“No?” Lucy is starting to wonder if this was in fact a mistake, latte or otherwise. This man is clearly not right in the head. Still, though, it almost makes her… sad. “We’ve never met.”

“Ah.” Flynn folds up the paper and puts it back. “Yes,” he says, half to himself. “You wouldn’t have, would you?”

“Care to cut out the Tall, Dark, and Cryptic act, and give me some answers?”

“As I said. None of it would make sense. But I have to tell you anyway. I took the information you gave me. I went back and killed the men who killed my family. They’re… here. Alive. But it’s not the same as it was. They think I’ve just been gone for three years – and I have, more than I can ever explain. Lorena thinks I just left one day and didn’t come back. Iris – ”

He stops. Whatever he was about to say is clearly too painful to go on, and Lucy, despite the fact that absolutely no part of this makes the remotest bit of sense, feels her heart twist. “I’m sorry,” she says, with no idea what she’s comforting him for. “But I didn’t give you any information.”

“Let’s just agree that you don’t have the full story, Lucy.” He speaks calmly, but with an edge of irritation. “Yes?”

Lucy’s hand clenches on her drink. She doesn’t have to sit here and subject herself to this escapee from the mental asylum, can get up and tell him to stick it. But there was still that sense this morning, this entire day, that something is missing, and very much against her better judgment, she stays in her chair. “If I don’t,” she says at last, almost a whisper, _“tell me.”_

“I can’t. It makes no sense.” He looks frustrated. “I told you once that after I saved them, I would leave, because I could no longer be their husband and father after what I’ve done. And now I return to a world where they never died, where I never became a wanted terrorist, never stole the Mothership, and so you and I never met – or the other two, for that matter. You can tell Rufus I’m sorry about Chicago – but then. As you said. You don’t know him.”

Lucy keeps staring at him. As strange, as utterly _cracked_ as this sounds, she is almost starting, or so she thinks, to get what he thinks, in his deluded little brain, is going on here. Some kind of alternate-universe, parallel-existence BS, where some version of her met some version of him, and they – well, she’s still completely lost on what they were supposed to be doing, but at least it explains why he’s so insistent that they know each other. “Do I… know you?” she asks again, slowly. Hesitantly. “Were we friends?”

“No,” he says quietly. “We weren’t friends.”

She wants to dispute that, the same impulse to reassure anyone selling themselves short, but instead he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a thumb drive. “Here,” he says. “Your journal doesn’t exist anymore, because you never had any reason to write it, but I did my best. You gave my world back, the least I can do is return the favor. I wrote down as much as I could think of, what happened. Look at it. You don’t have to see me again.”

Stunned, Lucy takes it by reflex. “This – ”

“Be careful, Lucy,” he says, still more quietly. “It’s not going to be easy to open that box. I don’t blame you if you don’t want to. Your life now is a lie – ” he shrugs a third time, that expression of trying to communicate that he doesn’t care, it’s nothing to him, when she can tell that he does, more than anything – “but not one you’d have any way of easily disproving. And not one that would hurt you, perhaps, to stay in. But if the time comes when you want answers, at least you’ll have them.”

Lucy opens and shuts her mouth. Nothing comes out.

“And as I said. You don’t have to see me again.” He finishes his espresso, puts the demitasse cup on the saucer. “I’m not sure where I’m going to go just yet. It’s… being the only one who remembers, it’s… it’s not something I’d wish on my worst enemy. And believe me, I know what it means to say that. You used to, once.”

“Garcia – ” This is the most surreal half-hour of her life, and yet Lucy can’t help but feel sorry for him. She leans forward, putting a hand over his as he seems to be ready to get up and leave, and his eyes flare with shock. “I’m sorry, all right? I hope you do find what you’re looking for.”

He looks at her. As if – and this, of course, is utterly not what it is, but she thinks it for a second anyway – it’s sitting in front of him right now, and because there is no other choice, not even the remote dream of one, he will get up and walk away forever. As if whatever he lost the first time, he knew all along there was no going back, and he has burned his bridge to a second chance. Their eyes flick to her hand on his, and a constrained shudder moves through him, as if the fact that she’s touching him gently and sympathetically proves once and for all that she truly does have no idea who he is. Wryly he says, “You’ve never called me that before.”

Lucy wants to point out that she’s never called him anything, since they don’t know each other, but arguing him out of this elaborate and complicated delusion would take more time than she has, and she senses somehow that it’s all he has left. His eyes flicker to the diamond engagement ring on her finger. “I’m taking it,” he says, “that’s not from the idiot?”

“What? Noah? Do you know Noah too?”

“No. I don’t.” He keeps looking at her. She really wishes he’d stop, or at least that he’d blink, or something, anything would break this spell. And at the same time, as insane as he is, and insane as all this is, it is the only thing that feels solid or centered or real, as if he’s drawn her into that slightly altered reality around him, where time moves slower, where the world is bent that just bit different, where the odd ache in her chest is gone, and it –

Well.

It makes _sense._

She almost wants to tell him not to leave, when thirty minutes earlier, she couldn’t wait to get rid of him. They stare at each other over the table, their silence straining even over the bustle of the coffee shop, until he finally clears his throat. “I’ll walk you back to your office?”

“Ah. Yes, of course.” Lucy distractedly crams the last bit of her croissant into her mouth, chews, washes it down with a few slugs of her lukewarm latte, and gets to her feet. They head out and walk back toward the history department, as she finds herself dawdling, dragging her steps, wanting a few more moments around him. “So, are you going to be in Palo Alto long?”

“No. Just for today.” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “As I said, I wanted to tell you that it was done. I destroyed the Mothership, by the way. Rittenhouse won’t get hold of it, but…” He pauses, as if trying to decide what else to tell her. “I can’t guarantee that Mason Industries won’t invent a new one. Then maybe this will get a chance to happen after all. Who knows.”

“You have to know,” Lucy says gently, “none of this means anything to me.”

“No,” he says again. His eyes are very far away. Perhaps it’s her imagination that he too is delaying this last parting (last parting? That sounds dark and tragic and damaging, as if he’s a part of her soul she can’t send away, and not just an eccentric stranger she charitably had a coffee with for a few minutes this morning) as long as he can, his last connection to any world he knew, any chance of understanding what’s going to happen to him next. As if when he says she won’t see him again, he means it in a way she can’t even possibly imagine.

They reach the history building and walk up to her office. “So,” Lucy says at last. “That was… well, I don’t know exactly, but… I hope you find some peace, all right?” Moved by a sudden impulse, she reaches out and squeezes his hand. “If you’re back in town, let’s have coffee again.”

“I won’t bother you.” His large fingers curl briefly around hers, as if pressing an ungiven kiss into her palm. “I wish you the best. Goodbye, Lucy.”

And with that, he inclines his head again. Pulls up the collar of his overcoat, and turns around, striding out of the office, the door shutting behind him. As she stands there, tempted to ask someone if they actually saw him, or if she’s just been conversing with herself this whole time in true cracked-academic, _Beautiful Mind-_ style. As if he is indeed a visitor from a parallel reality briefly intruding on her own, one of those inexplicable incidents that you tell as a good story at a cocktail party. And there is certainly no reason for her chest to ache as much as it does. As if her heart was whole for a few beats, and now with him, and whatever life he thinks she belonged to, taken from her again, it’s fractured back into pieces.

Lucy closes her fingers around the flash drive he gave her. She doesn’t want to read his bizarre manifesto. It would be best to throw it out, not have it sit there, tempting.

Would be best.

She goes inside to her office. Opens up her email again, tries to concentrate. Still so much to do. There always is. Wedding. Mom. Tenure. It repeats in her head like an echoing, endless litany.

Her phone buzzes. It’s a text from Noah.   _Hey beautiful! How’s my favorite historian doing? On my lunch – miss you. Hope Monday isn’t too bad. See you tonight. Xoxo._

Lucy stares at it for a long moment, fiddling with the ring on her finger. _I’m taking it that isn’t from the idiot,_ Garcia Flynn’s voice whispers.

Lucy gets up, closes her office door. Sits down in her chair, leans her head into her hands, and silently, thoroughly, savagely, with no idea who or what she is even grieving, begins to sob.


	2. Chapter 2

“Yeah, no,” Noah says. “That doesn’t sound slightly weird, Lucy. That sounds full-on, balls-out _insane.”_

Lucy doesn’t answer immediately, concentrating on chopping the carrot and not her finger. They’re making dinner together, as Monday is the only night of the week that their schedules coincide long enough to let them both out at the same semi-reasonable hour, and she tries to comfort herself with the familiar routine, the savory smell in the kitchen (it’s barely two-butt-sized, but they make do) and Noah’s obviously very logical contention that the whole thing was either a bad-taste joke, some actor doing an ambush-unsuspecting-people-and-film-their-reactions piece of performance art, or a sicko trying to scout her out to get close, judge the possibility of gaslighting her into thinking they know each other. All of this, and anything else, is about a hundred times more likely than whatever Garcia Flynn was trying to claim. Anything.

“Honestly,” Noah goes on, scraping the diced leeks off the cutting board and into the pot, “I think we should call the cops. The guy talked about killing people? Thinks you gave him information for it? He’s not stable. I want to know right away if he comes back, okay?”

“He said he wasn’t going to.” Lucy finishes the carrots, then ducks down to check how the bread is doing. “I don’t know why, but I. . . kind of believed him.”

“Why?” Noah gives her a funny look. “You don’t _actually_ know this guy, do you?”

“Of course not! What, you think that I’ve known this random crazy man all along and haven’t said anything about it, and am conspiring with him in whatever he’s up to?” Lucy is hurt. “Thanks!”

“Honey, no, that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be a dick. I’m just worried for your safety. Are you sure we shouldn’t file a restraining order?”

“Like I said. I got the feeling he meant it. That he was going to leave and not come back.” Why this still should hurt at all, hours after her brief, silent breakdown in her office, Lucy doesn’t know, and decides not to think about. “Anyway, how was your day? Anything thrilling happen on the orthopedic surgery floor?”

Noah gives her a slightly odd look, as this determined change of subject clearly isn’t doing anything to disabuse his notion that she’s repressing her feelings again (she’s not repressing, she’s just _dealing_ with things, things she can handle, what’s in front of her). But he doesn’t push it, they stir the stew and set the table, pull the bread out of the oven, and break open a bottle of whatever is next up the wine scale from Two-Buck Chuck (Five-Buck Clive?) They chat more or less as normal, but Lucy doesn’t tell him about the flash drive that Flynn gave her. She knows she should, so he can suggest that she do the right thing and either destroy it, or hand it over to the cops as evidence when Flynn inevitably turns up in the news for doing something stupid and/or dangerous. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t even know why.

While Noah is taking a shower, Lucy opens her laptop and Googles “Garcia Flynn.” She doesn’t get much; nothing, in fact. Right, because it’s probably an assumed name, something he’s picked to cover his tracks. But just to be thorough, and on a whim, she Googles “Lorena Flynn,” as she recalls him mentioning that name. This does turn something up. A Facebook page, that while it is set to private and she can’t get all the details, at least gives a location: Dubrovnik, Croatia. Croatia – she supposes that could explain the accent. And it’s a bit surprising that even this much proof of his story exists, when she was prepared for it all to be fictional. But then, all the best lies have a kernel of truth at the center, that bit to give them their veneer of plausibility. He could have done his research, borrowed real people to support his story. What that is, and why that is, Lucy still has no idea. She stares at Lorena’s picture. An elegant, classically attractive woman, looks like an old Hollywood film star a bit, dark waves of hair and designer sunglasses. She doesn’t look like the kind of woman who’d marry a lunatic. But then, of course, that is hardly the wisest metric to go by. The best ones can bury it the deepest inside.

There’s a sound in the hall as Noah gets out of the shower, and Lucy jumps and quickly closes the window, like a kid looking at Those Pictures on the internet while their parents’ backs are turned. She’s not doing anything wrong, objectively speaking. If anything, she’s just covering her bases, performing due diligence. The sort of things historians do, when faced with a mysterious individual who needs identifying before the paper can proceed. Ordinary.

“Hey.” Noah sticks his head into the living room, towel around his waist, wet and shirtless. “You still working? Come on, it’s only Monday. You gotta pace yourself.”

“I – yeah, just checking something.” Lucy shuts the laptop and smiles. “Sorry.”

“You wanna join me for, you know?” Noah waggles an eyebrow. “A little night music?”

“I – ” The words _I have a headache_ actually almost pass her lips. “I’ll just be a minute, Noah, okay? Go on, get into bed, I know you’ve had a long day too.”

He gives her a second, slower look, as this answer, while objectively ordinary and acceptable, is – when considered with the rest of the day’s events – decidedly evasive. But he pauses, then nods and withdraws, heading back into the bathroom to get dried off and changed into his pajamas. Lucy waits until she hears the bedroom door shut and the TV click on, then puts down the computer and clenches her fists, furious at herself. Whatever this is, whatever effect it’s had on her, she has let it go on more than long enough. She can write it off as anything she wants, any angle she wants to put on it about sick mom or work stress or wedding planning headaches, but she’s completely thrown, off-balance, and has no idea how to regain it. Unless she does something, well, incredibly stupid, and anything further with Garcia Flynn whatsoever is going to fit that description to a tee.

She fishes in her pocket and pulls out the flash drive. Opens the computer back up and plugs it in, wondering too late if it’s going to download some kind of virus, hold her hard drive for ransom, something like that. The only file on it is a Word document. _For Lucy._

Lucy hesitates. She distinctly remembers him saying something about it not being easy to look at the answers, and that she had better be sure she wants them. You’d think, if he was trying to recruit her into whatever con he’s playing, that he would insist she read it. Unless this is some sort of reverse-psychology trick designed to fake her into it. That’s it, isn’t it? So it looks as if she decided to do it on her own?

Good god, is she ever overthinking this.

Lucy stares at the document for a frustrated moment longer. Then she can’t bring herself to click on it, closes it, and ejects the drive, getting up to hide it in her purse. If he turns up in the news for unsavory reasons in the next few days, she’ll hand it over to the police. Otherwise, that is the end of this.

That is the end of this.

Lucy doesn’t sleep terribly well that night, and by the time she wakes up, Noah is already gone; he works the buttcrack-of-dawn shift on Tuesdays. She groans, silences her alarm, and rolls out of bed to get ready, remembering to make breakfast this time since she doesn’t want to rely on the charity of crazy strangers for Starbucks. It’s as she’s standing in stocking feet, gulping down toast and checking her phone, that she glances out and sees a black car parked outside the house.

She thinks nothing of it, at first. It’s a public street, after all. But after she’s brushed her teeth and has put on her jacket, double-checking she has her papers and her notes, she heads out to her car and gets in, determined not to act as if she has anything to hide. She pulls out without incident, and has almost made it to the end of the block when, in her rearview mirror, she catches sight of the car backing out as well and rolling casually down the road after her.

Lucy’s hands tighten on the wheel. They are not, she reminds herself, following her. This is still within the realm of allowable coincidence. And if they are on a stakeout looking for people that, say, their crazy suspect might have recently made contact with, she could, again, just hand them the flash drive and probably do everyone a favor. She merges into morning traffic on the Bayshore Freeway and determinedly puts it out of her mind.

The rest of the day is more or less normal. She’s still a bit distracted at her lecture, but manages to bull through it. She spends the afternoon battling through her inbox and doing admin; there is a history department meeting later, but she can probably skip it. They email the minutes around anyway, and she wants to talk to her sister.

Lucy heads out just in time to catch the evening rush, sits drumming her fingers on the wheel for some interminably long interval, and finally makes it to her mom’s house in Mountain View. This is Google/Facebook/Silicon Valley Nerd HQ, so if the family hadn’t owned the house for a few generations already, they definitely would have been far outpriced by now, and as Lucy pulls into the driveway, she notices that the in-home nurse’s car is parked by the detached garage. She isn’t going to be able to just drop in and talk to Amy without getting the report on her mom as well, so she should probably brace herself for that. Okay.

Lucy parks and gets out, heading up the walk and knocking. Amy opens the door with her headphones still around her neck; she does a weekly podcast on politics and feminism and liberal activism, that kind of thing. She has a few regular listeners and even some advertisers, though she hasn’t figured out how to monetize it consistently, hence why (among other reasons) she’s still stuck at home as the primary caregiver for their mom.  Lucy would invite her to move in with her and Noah, but their apartment is small enough as it is, and however close she and Amy are, it is still awkward to third-wheel with your big sister and her fiancé. She knows it’s hard on Amy, though, that this has fallen so disproportionately on her. Mom used to nag her to get a real job, do something with her life, not just dink around on the internet. Follow Lucy’s example. Be more like Lucy. Study hard, like Lucy. Amy’s been half in her shadow most of her life, seven years younger. Always encouraged Lucy to do her own thing more, to take that job at Kenyon College, rather than staying beholden to Stanford and Mom’s legacy there. But just as Amy can’t quite leave, uncomfortable as the fit may be, Lucy can’t either.

“Hey, you.” Lucy hugs her sister and follows her inside to the kitchen. “How’s – how’s Mom?”

“Same. As usual.” Amy attempts a shrug. It sounds horrendously callous to say that you wish something would happen, something would _change,_ when that means your mother is going to die – as domineering and inescapable as Carol Preston could be, her daughters do love her. “Aren’t you usually busy later on Tuesdays?”

“Yeah. I needed to. . . to ask you about something, actually.” Lucy sits down at the table as Amy makes them hot chocolate. With that, not knowing how to do this except straight out, she launches into the strange story of Garcia Flynn and his visit yesterday, the flash drive he gave her, his insistence that they used to know each other, and the rest. Even the car this morning, and her brief and doubtless mistaken insistence that it was following her. It spills out of her, all of it.

Amy listens impassively, though her fingers tap on her mug. She doesn’t tell Lucy that she’s crazy, which would be the obvious solution. Then she says, “So what do you want to do?”

“I have no idea.” Lucy rubs her temples with her cold fingers. “I can’t deny that what he said kind of. . . I don’t know what it was, just that it almost felt like it might explain something. But, well, obviously he was a few branches short of a tree. I have enough crap going on in my life right now. I don’t need to get involved in this.”

“But,” Amy says, with her usual knack of cutting through Lucy’s evasions and rationalizations and getting to the heart of a situation. “You want to.”

Lucy looks up with a wry, faint smile. “It’s a mystery. You know how I am about those.”

“Yeah, but you usually work on historical ones, stuff that took place years ago and can’t turn up or develop in unexpected ways now. Live mysteries are a little more dangerous, Lucy. Especially, by the sound of things, this one.”

“Pretty much.” Lucy sighs. “I’m not going to do anything dumb. I just. . . he seemed really convinced that it was something to do with me, and I. . .”

“You like to help people,” Amy says. “Even crazy ones who turn up out of the blue at your office one day. Did you read whatever it was he gave you? His Zodiac Killer letters, or whatever?”

“No. I’m. . .” Lucy hesitates. “I’ll do it later this evening,” she says, unsure if that is a lie or not. “I should get going if I don’t want to sit on 280 all night. Love you, Pooh Bear, thanks for letting me vent.”

“You’re welcome, Piglet.” Amy manages a grin. “Hey, it’s a lot more interesting than anything going on in _my_ life right now.”

Lucy nuzzles her sister’s head affectionately – what would she do without her? – grabs her purse, and heads out of the house, oddly relieved to escape without being required to pay court on her mother. She opens her purse, fishes for her keys, and –

“Miss Preston?”

She looks up with a considerable start, almost dropping them. It’s a guy in a black suit and tie – not Flynn, though – who couldn’t look more government-agent if he tried. “Can I ask you a few questions? Briefly, I promise.”

“Excuse me? No, you can’t. This is private property, by the way. So you are here. . . why?”

He smiles. “I’m sure your mother wouldn’t mind.”

This is an odd enough statement that it catches at Lucy briefly, but does not engender in her any further desire to cooperate with him. She turns her back and starts to get into her car, only to discover that there’s another one of them leaning against it. “Just a minute, Miss Preston, that’s all we ask. We can make this quick, you’re not in any trouble. So if you’d – ”

“No, I’m not interested in it, and I’d like to be on my way please.”

“Miss Preston – ”

“Hey,” a voice says from the sidewalk. “There a problem here, gentlemen?”

The agents (since that is clearly what they are) glance up with a start, to see some guy out for an evening stroll unwisely deciding to insert himself into their business. He’s cute in a boy-next-door kind of way, clean-cut, blue-eyed, though the faint whiff of Budweiser is just enough to make Lucy wonder if he’s located his courage recently and in liquid form and has no idea what he’s walking into. He has a certain way of standing, however, a cool and careless ease, that makes her think that she wouldn’t want to pick a fight with him. As the agents stare at him, he repeats, “Problem?”

“No, sir. None. You step along and enjoy your evening.”

He grins. A bit sardonically. Looks at Lucy. “Ma’am?”

Lucy gives him the _please-make-these-assholes-leave_ look that every woman has had to perfect, and he picks up on it right away. He steps forward, pulls something out of his pocket – a badge or something, she doesn’t see what exactly it’s supposed to be, but either way, it makes the agents scowl at him, but decide not to push their luck. They slope off into their unmarked car – though Lucy wishes that she could be sure that’s the last time she’ll see them – and she glances at her unexpected rescuer. “I – well, thanks. I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome, ma’am.”

“Again? Ma’am? Really?”

“Sorry.” He shrugs, holds out a hand. “Wyatt Logan.”

“Lucy Preston. Nice to meet you.”

They shake. She’s tempted to ask him what exactly he showed the Bad News Bears to make them leave, but it’s also not something she’s liable to get a straight answer for. “So what, you just take nighttime walks in case you need to swoop in and make some creeps clear out?”

He shrugs. “No. That was by accident. Better than sitting at home by myself, though. I – ” He pauses as if about to say something, and stops. “You have a nice night, m – Lucy.”

“Thanks.” She smiles at him quickly, as he continues on his way, she glances after him for a moment with a strange, fleeting sense of déjà-vu, and then gets into the car. It strikes her that he has the same sort of lingering sadness around him as Flynn, a ghost that walks quietly next to him and breathes his air and colors all his shadows, a man who has been sitting and drinking in an empty house, not to feel good or to enjoy himself or share the burden, but simply to forget about it just for a little while, to breathe without the ironclad ache in his chest that is there the rest of the time. She wonders suddenly if he’s lost a wife too. No reason. Just occurred to her.

She gets into the car, not without a final look around. As if she’s expecting something, somewhere, someone, anyone to be waiting to stop her.

They’re not. She drives home. Checks around before she gets out. No one there.

No one there.

* * *

Garcia Flynn has done a stupid fucking thing.

(Rather, he thinks bitterly, like the rest of his stupid fucking life.)

He didn’t even realize how much until last night, when he’s sitting in some dim-lit, no-account bar in Las Vegas (looks slightly different from ’62, though the showgirls and the bright lights and the bad decisions never change – seems like a good place for him) drinking as much as the bartender would serve him, and someone slides onto the creaky chrome stool next to him. “Excuse me. Mr. Leslie?”

Flynn starts slightly, as that was the name he used to use for his intelligence work – _Leslie_ was Errol Flynn’s middle name, and he used to wish so hard to be _that_ Flynn when he grew up, the cowboy and swashbuckler and adventurer, and not _this_ one, this. . . God, whatever it is, he doesn’t know. Still, though, he’s not in the mood to play. In Croatian, just to be an ass, he says, “I don’t speak English. Go away.”

“I think you do.” The man answers him in the same language, making Flynn’s head spin sharply, and gives half a shrug, as if to say that this didn’t _have_ to be hard. He is clearly unaware that he is dealing with the master of doing things the hard way. “Can we talk?”

“I can’t stop you.” Flynn throws back another shot, which burns all the way down. He won plenty of drinking contests against Russians, which is no mean feat, but he feels almost light-headed, whether from a combination of drinking on an empty stomach or – fuck, he knows well enough, now that he’s a vagrant who remembers a world that nobody else does, who has saved his family and lost his soul, and has nothing and no one else to live for. “Or at least, it would be messy if I did. Do you really want to make them stay late mopping you off the floor?”

“Funny. Still a funny man. Not that I’d think you have any reason to be.” His interrogator is a completely ordinary-looking sort (but then, they all are). Looks vaguely Slavic, though if that’s the reason for the Croatian, which they are still speaking, who knows. “We know what you did.”

“Congratulations.” Flynn wonders if the bartender will give him another. “What did I do?”

“You stopped the hit on your family. Destroyed the Mothership. Altered the timeline back to its original format – almost.” The man – no, the Rittenhouse agent – looks at him with calm, cool eyes. “Left a few snags here and there. But for the most part, yes.  Nobody remembers, because technically, none of your adventures ever happened. You never stole the machine, and they never followed you. So as a result, nothing you did to us in the past ever happened. We’re still here, just as we always were. We’re still angry, and stronger than ever. _And_ you just destroyed our time machine.”

At that, Flynn almost does go for his gun, stopped barely in time by the knowledge that if he opens fire even in a dive like this, he will spend at least the next night in jail, and it’s going to be difficult to get out even without _quite_ all of his previous criminal record. Stealing the Mothership wasn’t the only thing he’s done on the wrong side of the law, just the most spectacular, though it’s true he’s mostly broken said law with government immunity. He wonders if the NSA will object to one of their assets being swept up like this, or even if he still works for them. Nothing makes sense. But he is now sitting here being blackmailed by fucking _Rittenhouse,_ and if they think he’ll take that lying down –

“Did you,” he growls, this time in English, “have a point to make?”

His interrogator shrugs. “Did I? You know, we might have let it slide if you’d _just_ gone back and saved your family. Even thanked you. After all, without that, you never steal the Mothership, those three never get involved or find out about us, we’re able to complete our launch and acquisition at Mason Industries, no mess, no foul. But then you had to both destroy the Mothership, in which we had invested a _great_ deal of time and capital, _and_ you had to give Lucy Preston information about the old timeline, as well as the role that she and her. . . friends played in it. If she gains knowledge about it, she’ll become a threat. All of them will.”

Flynn has been about to rage, but at that, he freezes. Thinks abruptly that indeed, in his hunger to see Lucy one more time, to tell her that it was done, he’s inadvertently caused the opposite to happen. Forgot that Rittenhouse was anything but defanged – that indeed, by saving his wife and daughter, he has erased all of his own efforts to remove them from history. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, it shouldn’t matter – but now they’re stronger than ever, angrier than ever, and he has supplied them with a wealth of targets on which to punish him for his presumption. Lorena and Iris themselves, back in Dubrovnik, convinced that he just walked out on them without a word for three years, far longer than he’d ever been afield on any mission. Had an explosive argument about it, everything he tried to explain obviously sounding like utter delusional nonsense, until Lorena ordered him to get his head straight and not come back until it was. That may take, at a minimum, until the heat death of the universe. Iris staring at him and seeing a stranger, exactly as he feared. Five seconds of the happy reunion, and then it all fell to pieces.

And now, he has painted a target on Lucy’s back for a resurgent and very much alive Rittenhouse. Given her everything, the whole story, out of whatever stupidly noble, misguided impulse he had to fill her in on what she’d forgotten. If she reads it, if she remembers, if she believes even a fraction of it, if she starts looking, asking questions –

He’s saved his family, yes.

Saved his family, and destroyed everything else.

Flynn feels as if there is an angry rhinoceros in his chest struggling to get out. He grips the scarred edge of the bar, struggling to absorb the magnitude of his mistake, which is impressive even by his standards. He can’t protect Lorena and Iris _and_ Lucy, and everyone else who Rittenhouse is going to hurt in retaliation for his attempts to take them down. Indeed, nobody has seen anything yet, in terms of their possible destructive power. All stops out. No holds barred.

Jesus.

_Jesus._

“We’re watching her, you know,” the agent goes on. “We know you visited her. You better hope you live up to your promise to stay away. From all of them. If you contact your wife and daughter again, if you contact Lucy again, if you thought you’d be clever and send something to Logan or Carlin as well, if you so much as glance at a picture of them online, we’ll know. And then we’ll kill all of them, and this time, there will be no Mothership for you to fix it. You’ll just get to live with that. Forever. You disappear, cause no more trouble for us, and they live happily ever after. Sounds like a plan, doesn’t it?” He grins. “Huh, _Garcia?”_

Flynn remains completely motionless. He is plunging through endless, icy, dark water, curling and cutting in his chest. He has never been so afraid – and so angry – in his entire life.

The Rittenhouse agent waits for his answer. When it doesn’t come, he shrugs, finishes his drink, and stands up. “Have a nice night,” he says. Puts on his hat. The bar door opens and shuts.

He’s gone.


	3. Chapter 3

Rufus Carlin turns off the music well in advance, straightens his collar, and makes sure that both his hands are visible on the steering wheel as he pulls into the slow-moving car queue spilling out the front gates of Mason Industries. Black guys can hardly expect anything wonderful when the police are involved to start with, and over the last week, security has gone from “tight” to “G20 summit as hosted by a paranoid dictator.” Everyone is subjected to thorough inspections both entering and leaving work, and God help you if you have a McDonald’s receipt you can’t account for. Rufus spent twenty minutes yesterday explaining to the latest rent-a-thug that yes, he usually gets breakfast on the way, and yes, he used his personal credit card to pay for it. He’s surprised they didn’t demand his SSN and PIN on the spot to double-check at the bank. But after everything that’s going on, the unexpected detonation of the Mothership and the loss of the last fifteen years of Connor Mason’s life’s work, perhaps that is, alas, to be expected. They still have the Lifeboat, but it’s only a prototype, doesn’t run yet. Although he’s obviously not about to say so at any office water coolers, Rufus wonders if perhaps this wasn’t the worst outcome in the world. At least nobody’s ever going to get the chance to, you know. _Use_ the damn thing.

He sits and waits, more or less patiently, as he’s finally inspected and given the green light to proceed inside the compound and park. Rufus does, gets out, and swipes his ID card three times to get inside, along with his _new_ ID card twice. Everyone has been pulled into the office for “quarterly review” – which, given that this is February and a time machine was destroyed two days ago, is clearly thinly veiled code for “are we going to fire and/or arrest you because you had something to do with it?” Rufus already had his go-round with the Spanish Inquisition, and managed to more or less convince them that he is the last person in the world who would want to steal, blow up, borrow, or otherwise have anything to do with the practical operation of a time machine. He is not cut out to be a hero. He’s just a number-cruncher, happier with computers and gizmos and gadgets and the safety of a controlled environment. It has occurred to him that it might be a great way to impress Jiya, but surely there has to be something to win over a girl that is easier to pull off than “intrepid time traveling Rambo.” He’ll say hi to her today. He will.

Rufus makes it to his desk and opens up the file which has been left on it, flipping through the papers. That newspaper article from the _Chronicle_ is a bit of a joke now, given that what they are actually launching, one of their new high-speed transportation concepts, has been completely overshadowed by the loss of the Mothership. Connor has said that _they_ are very, very angry, and while Rufus has no idea who “they” are, the kind of people who would fund the research and development of a _frigging time machine_ are not going to hear of its loss, say, “Oh, well, that’s unfortunate,” and wander off to see what’s on Netflix. Obviously, this isn’t public knowledge, but one thing about the whole case is bothering Rufus (hah, he thinks, just one). They managed to retrieve a cache of the Mothership’s CPU – not the whole thing, and badly damaged, but enough data to get a decent look at its state of operations right before it blew up. And while Rufus would need to do the calculations again to be sure, from what he can tell, the Mothership _was_ used. Close to twenty times. Almost forty if you count the return trips.

Except, of course, for the fact that it never has been, and was destroyed before it ever could be.

Rufus has run this through a few times, and he’s fairly sure that he’s the only one who’s come up with the conclusion. It’s so out there (and possibly dangerous) that he doesn’t exactly want to be the one to point it out, stroll into Connor’s office with a stack of printouts and ask hey, did we somehow miss the Mothership randomly vanishing into the past for extended periods? Maybe during that long lunch? Hah, funny story, us building a time machine and losing it, _zany,_ right? Perhaps he could tell Anthony, as this seems like the kind of thing he should know, but something is still holding him back. If he had a second set of eyes, someone as smart as him or smarter, but not his boss, who might ask him yet more difficult and fiddly questions. . . Rufus has nothing to hide, so it baffles him and unnerves him that it somehow feels like he does. But who can he –

And then, it strikes him. Oh _God._

Apparently he’s going to say hi to Jiya today after all.

“So.” Rufus, having rehearsed his opening line in his head for about the past ten minutes, panics, blanks, forgets it, and has to scramble not to fall over as the rolling chair he’s casually leaning on scoots out from underneath him. Somewhere, Don Juan just had an aneurysm. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, hey.” Jiya glances up at him with a grin, which Rufus has obsessed about: is it a grin, the kind you give coworkers, or a _grin_ grin, the kind you give coworkers you might like? “What’s up?”

“I was going over the data from the CPU dump again, and. . .” Rufus does his best to sound as cool and interesting as he can. “I picked up something a little weird. And, well, you’re the smartest tech here, so if you have a moment, I thought we could double-check it?”

Jiya giggles a bit, which makes his heart turn over. God, he likes this girl so much. Going into a recital of all the reasons why would officially push him into creeptastic stalker territory, which he swears he’s not. But from the moment she started at Mason Industries eighteen months ago, yeah, he’s been completely gone. He went to MIT, she went to Caltech, so they have periodic ribbing over which of their schools is currently atop the number-one ranking. She wears video-game shirts and cosplays at Comic-Con. He loves the scent of her shampoo and the way she bites her nail polish and knows the answer to anything. She’s so much braver than he is. So much more everything. He knows that he is punching above his weight class here, but still.

“Sure,” Jiya says after a moment, pushing back her chair and standing up. “Hit me up.”

Rufus is horribly tempted to remark that yes, he _very_ much wants to do exactly that, but he is not the kind of guy who can pull off that kind of comment, and it’s rude anyway. He gulps, scoops up his papers, and follows her into one of the glass-walled conference rooms overlooking the main warehouse. Once they’ve shut the door, Jiya hits a button to lower the security shade and turns to him. “Okay. What you got?”

Rufus spreads the printouts on the table and explains his hunch. He knows it sounds ludicrous, and the Mothership was probably just malfunctioning (since it was, you know, about to be blown up by agent or agent(s) unknown). But if that was the case, the rest of the systems should show errors or aberrations or general electronic interference as well, and they don’t. It’s everything that you would expect to see if the Mothership had indeed been used successfully, and repeatedly. Running perfectly, in fact. Except that it hasn’t.

A frown links Jiya’s thick dark brows as she listens. When he finishes, she grabs the pencil from behind her ear and leans over the papers herself, doing the calculations. “That is. . .” she says at last, slowly. “That is weird.”

Rufus is somewhat relieved that it’s not only him spotting the abnormalities, but he was also sort of hoping she’d tell him that they were explainable. Basically, the science goes like this. The Mothership is what they’ve dubbed a Feynman machine, named after a highly influential theory in particle physics by one Richard Feynman. The classical model of system trajectory postulates a fixed, single path for a particle traveling from point A to point B, which is hence assumed to obey normal laws of motion – that is, taking the path of least resistance, linear forward movement. Feynman, however, argued that this took no account of the essentially irrational actions of subatomic particles, and that an infinity of possible paths had to be imagined instead, all with equal weight of magnitude. The particle could have traveled in a straight line, yes, but it could just as probably have circled around, gone in a figure eight, shot to a parallel universe, down a wormhole, and back. Therefore, an agent propelled to high enough resonances to interact with the quantum level in this way can theoretically go anywhere – or any _when –_ in space and time.

Ordinarily, the strong interference of normative probability – that the agent would just go from A to B, that an apple would fall when dropped, that there was only one discrete and physically actionable universe – cancels out the absurd trajectories and produces the expected result. But Feynman showed that allowing for every one of these extraordinary voyages was fully compatible with the conventional model of motion and Schrödinger’s equation, and what has drawn Rufus’s attention is the lingering evidence of these exact extraordinary journeys in the quantum fabric, these twists and ripples and folds. The description that comes to mind is “Swiss cheese.” As if numerous small, localized irregularities have been ripped into it, then healed – almost, but not quite. As if the timeline was absolutely land-mined with interference and change, and then jerked back to the original blueprint – almost, but not quite.

As if, perhaps, the Mothership’s evidence is no mistake. As if it _was_ used, and then set up somehow to cause a paradox where it wasn’t. The basic problem: if your future self arrived to tell you to do something, would you do it because they told you to, but in that case, where did _they_ get the idea, if you had to tell it to yourself? There’s no logical entry into the cause and effect; it’s a twisted Möbius strip, like a hamster going around and around on a wheel. Build up too many of these, and the universe starts to get unhappy. Has a tendency to violently correct them, snap the strip, explode the bubble of trapped probability back to the linear progression. The results, when they have happened in controlled laboratory settings, have been. . . well. . .

The description that comes to mind for that is “bug on a windshield.”

Rufus and Jiya glance at each other slowly, as discovering that the universe has been chronologically destabilized and is at potentially at risk for sudden and violent spontaneous combustion is not the most comforting team-building exercise in the world. Obviously, they have to tell someone about this, but who? Connor? Anthony? There is already enough of a fire under Connor’s feet as it is, with the mysterious bad-guys-from- _The-Matrix_ types who have been stalking around and taking reams of notes and photos, and Anthony. . . he’s the project lead, this has been his baby from the start, surely he’s the genius who will whip this back into shape. But how? It sounds insane enough as it is, and how are they going to fix it? The Mothership is gone. The Lifeboat doesn’t work. There’s no proof that this even _happened._ And if it has, the best way to put this is that the timeline is now so angry with all these shenanigans and contortions, its response has been to suggest, “What if I just _explode,_ motherfucker? Huh? Serve you right. Asshole.” Then cartwheel out of the room, flipping the bird with both fingers.

 _You know,_ Rufus thinks. _This is exactly why I hate time travel._

(If the world might accidentally end on the spot if anyone does anything else irrational, the next speech from President Evil Cheeto might just finish them off – though that was a good bet in the first place. And the whole “gotta bang before we die” suggestion _is_ there to be made, so – )

Oh God. Seriously. Rufus shakes his head, wanting to smack himself. Then he gathers up the papers, endeavoring to sound matter-of-fact. “So, should we drop by and see if Anthony’s in?”

“Maybe?” Jiya frowns. “He’s been. . . weird recently, though. I don’t know if you noticed, but I swear, you’d think the Mafia was coming for him, the way he’s been walking on eggshells. I mean – ” she tilts her head at all the suits down on the floor – “they kind of are, but more. Maybe the loss of the whole thing cracked him. It was supposed to be his magnum opus, you know. Getting that blown up has to suck. More, I mean.”

“We have to tell him,” Rufus says stoutly. Anthony has to know,  because Anthony will think of something to fix it. He scoops up the file, they leave the conference room, and head down the catwalk to Anthony’s office. Knocks and opens the door a crack. “Hey?”

Anthony jumps a foot and spills his coffee on himself.

“Oh, jeez. Sorry.” Rufus scurries in and looks around for a roll of paper towels or something else to sponge up with. “Sorry, Anthony. Any idea when Agent Smith and his pals are clearing out?”

“Don’t – don’t say that.” Anthony’s hands are trembling slightly as he does his best to clean the spill. “I don’t know. Things are very – things are very delicate right now. Just keep your head down and do your job, Rufus. It would be – it wouldn’t be smart to draw their attention.”

Rufus frowns. “Look, I know accidentally losing a time machine isn’t really something to boast about in the end-of-year newsletter, but these dicks are starting to give me serious – ”

“SHHH!” Anthony looks as if he’s about to have a heart attack, and Rufus snaps his mouth shut, baffled and thrown. “Rufus, just. . . go back to your desk, all right?”

Rufus and Jiya exchange a glance, as if wondering if their grand plan is going down the tubes before their very eyes. Rufus holds the file a little tighter. “Anthony,” he says at last. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Fine. I’m fine. It’s just. . .” Anthony looks around for a clean shirt. “You know, I’m not sure I’m supposed to be. . . no, never mind. I’m sure this will all blow over, as long as we cooperate and give them what they want.”

“You know,” Rufus says. “That’s the second time I’ve heard someone talking about ‘they’ as if it’s a bigger problem than anyone’s letting on. Who exactly were we supposed to be building the Mothership for? Some kind of contract or commission? Because – ”

Anthony draws a finger over his throat. Rufus shuts his mouth with a snap. Whatever else he was going to say, he can feel himself, much like Fagin, deciding that he thinks he’ll think it out again. He backs up, file still in hand. “Got it,” he says. “Have a good day.”

Back at his desk on the operations floor, Rufus is less able to focus than ever, exhilaration of a semi-successful interaction with Jiya aside. Technically, he could go up to the suits-and-sunglasses and hand over his findings, if that’s going to get them out of Mason Industries’ hair, but something, he doesn’t even know what, stops him. He works steadily but inattentively on his programming prompts for most of the morning, until someone raps him on the shoulder. “Mr. Carlin?”

Rufus pulls out his headphones. “Yeah?”

The suit flashes a badge at him. “Agent Jake Neville, Homeland Security. Can you come with us, please?”

“Uh, what?” Rufus is confused. “I already had my clearance interview, I’ve got my new ID card, I’m legit.” He dangles it as proof. “So if you think you need to – ”

“We do need to ask you a few questions, yes. This way, please.”

With a feeling in his stomach as if he’s missed a step going downstairs, Rufus gets up from his chair – catches Jiya looking at him with a frown, maybe she’ll cry if he’s summarily shot in the back of the head and dumped in an unmarked grave – and follows Agent Neville to the room across the way, where Connor, Anthony, the rest of the brass, and a few more of the suits are sitting around a polished-chrome conference table. Rufus’s hands are starting to sweat. He really does not like pressure. “Hey, guys,” he says stupidly, like he just walked late into a pizza party and are wondering if they saved him a slice. “This whole thing, huh? Wild.”

Nobody laughs, or gives him so much as a sympathetic grin. Neville shuts the door, takes out a clicker, and lowers a screen. Points at it, and a picture flashes up. White dude, blue eyes, looks like a soldier, even in plainclothes. “Mr. Carlin, do you recognize this man?”

Rufus shoots a wild glance at Anthony, wondering if this is a trick question. “No?”

“Master Sergeant Wyatt Logan, Delta Force, U.S. Army Special Operations. Never heard of him?”

“No?” Rufus wonders if you’re allowed to blow somebody’s cover – the point of special ops, after all, is that you _don’t_ know who they are. Then again, Homeland Security probably does have some kind of prerogative on that. “Look, I’ve never met him in my life, okay?”

The suits exchange glances down the table. Agent Neville hits the clicker button again. Pretty brunette in a slim-fit blazer, stack of books in her arms; the picture looks as if it was taken from some kind of surveillance camera. “Lucy Preston. History professor, Stanford University.”

“No, I don’t know her either.” Rufus has no idea what they’re trying to trick him into, but this is ridiculous. “Look, if I’m going to answer any more questions, I want a lawyer.”

“Is that an admission of guilt, Mr. Carlin?”

“No! Because I have no clue what I’m even supposed to be on trial for!” Rufus wheels angrily on the whole foreboding lot of them. “Whoever did anything to that time machine, I already told you. Over and over. _I don’t know!”_

A pause. Some kind of silent rustle passes around the room. Agent Neville clicks.

“Do you know this man, Mr. Carlin?”

Rufus scowls heavily at the screen. Captain Jerkwad up there absolutely looks like some kind of Soviet sleeper agent: tall, dark parted hair, suit and tie, sharply chiseled features, definitely packing some kind of serious heat. “What?” Rufus says. “Flynn? I don’t – ”

And at that, he screeches to a halt. Aware, far too late, that – having no idea how – he has just made a terrible mistake.

The agents exchange glances. They didn’t tell him that name. Rufus came up with it on his own, and even worse, he has no notion at all where it came from: it was just on the tip of his tongue, he has no conscious recollection of it at all. It appears, however, to have been what they were looking for, and Agent Neville takes a step. “Mr. Carlin, if you’ll come with us?”

Rufus tries not to panic, even as Connor Mason stands up. “Come now. Is there. . . really a need for that?”

“He recognized him,” Neville says. “The number-one suspect in the detonation of the Mothership. I think that’s probable cause for further questioning, right there.”

“No! I have no idea who that guy is!” Rufus is frantic, desperate to make them believe him. “Connor, I don’t know who he is!”

“Yet,” Neville says, even more skeptically, “you knew his name?”

“I can’t tell you anything about him! _I don’t know who he is!”_

Connor takes half a step. Glances at the agents, and something unspoken seems to pass between them, turbulent and unsettling as wet concrete, the knowledge that it could set fast and trap you. “We don’t have any real reason to think he’s lying, do we?”

“We could find that out.”

“Rufus is a valuable member of my team. The most valuable, perhaps. If you want me to continue cooperating with you and allowing you full access to my facilities and technologies – surely you can at least obtain a warrant before hauling him off for questioning?” Mason smiles ingratiatingly. “If you _can_ find something to charge him with, then of course, far be it from me to obstruct the proper operation of the law. But – think about this carefully?”

Neville doesn’t look like he wants to. The tension remains acute. Then at last, once, he jerks his head. “Fine,” he says brusquely. “In the meantime, is there anything else you want to tell us, Mr. Carlin? Something to, say, convince us of your bona fides?”

Rufus thinks of the file. Of his conclusions. Of the apparent possibility that one of these days, the world might just pop like a balloon, and spill them all into the abyss.

“No, sir,” he says, tight as a badly wound string. “Nothing.”

* * *

Lucy Preston is not having a good idea.

In fact, it would be difficult to say when she’s ever had a worse one, strictly speaking. The rest of her week is crammed, she and Noah are supposed to meet with the wedding planner on Saturday, and even if she did have actual time in her schedule, this would still be a monumentally idiotic notion. But more than once this morning, she’s caught herself on Expedia or Orbitz browsing flights from San Francisco to Dubrovnik, mulling the idea of booking one last-minute, jaunting over there, and seeing what it turns up. Maybe try to find Lorena Flynn, warn her that her husband isn’t well, has been accosting strangers with copies of his garbage manifesto, trying to recruit them into some “The Aliens Are Coming” Heaven’s Gate-style thing. She hopes not, at any rate, but maybe Flynn has been approaching other people. Maybe there’s a pattern.

Lucy reminds herself, for the ten dozenth time, that the smart thing to do is call the police and let the law enforcement professionals handle it, rather than attempting some vigilante intervention on her own. But. . . for whatever reason, and especially after her visit from Evil Mulder and Scully last night, she’s not feeling too keen on cops right now. Noah would tell her to do it anyway, but. . . for some bizarre reason Lucy woke up late last night, with the brief and terrifying impression that she was in bed with a stranger. It faded, but it lasted long enough to leave her disoriented, unable to get back to sleep, groggy this morning, and avoiding Noah’s questions when he tried to ask if she was all right. She’s clearly being as conspicuous about this as possible, but whatever’s going on, she’s just about made up her mind to take Amy’s advice. Though Amy warned her as well that live mysteries are an entirely different animal from dead ones. Get involved in this, and she might be lucky if she gets to regret it.

Lucy is finally about to close the browser window and get back to work, when the phone on her desk rings. She hesitates, then picks it up. “Hello?”

“Miss Preston?” Three guesses as to who it sounds like on the other end. “Is this a good time?”

Lucy goes tense all over. “No, actually. It isn’t.”

“Miss Preston, as before, you aren’t in any trouble. But if you keep trying to avoid us in terms of having to ask just a few questions, we can’t guarantee – ”

“Who is _we?”_ Lucy asks. “The Borg?”

“Miss Preston – ”

“Okay, first of all.” She is just about completely out of patience to humor these pricks. “Don’t call me _Miss Preston._ I’m a thirty-three-year-old woman with two doctorates from and a professorship at Stanford, not some little girl drinking a Shirley Temple and feeling so grown up. You can call me _Dr. Preston,_ or _Professor Preston,_ or better yet, don’t call me at all. I already told you, I don’t have anything to say. If you’re legit, you can do this the legal way. Until then, don’t contact me again.”

With that, not giving them time to get a word in edgewise, Lucy bangs down the phone, far more vehemently than she meant to. She doesn’t even know what it is about them that’s setting her off like this, practically begging them to come after her with the brute squad, but every time she hears their voices, something cold and repulsed and inexplicable trickles through her entire body, souring her from head to toe, as if she can’t even think about cooperating. That if she does, she’ll die – or worse. It sounds melodramatic, to say the least. She can’t explain it even to herself.

Lucy sits staring at her computer screen for a moment longer. Then all at once, she clicks through to her recently closed tabs, and opens up Skyscanner. Five minutes later, having fished out the credit card that she’s been saving for wedding expenses, she has booked a departure from SFO at 6:10pm tonight on Turkish Airlines, connecting through Istanbul and arriving in Dubrovnik at 10:50am local time on the day after tomorrow. It’s going to be an ass of a long flight, but whatever. It briefly crosses her mind that it might make her look even more suspicious if she tries to leave the country to avoid being questioned by the government, but whatever.

She checks her watch. If she’s going to make it home and then to the airport in time to get through security for an international flight, she has to leave now, and she opens up her email, throws together a quick Out of Office AutoReply, sends a note to the head of the department making it sound like something has come up with her mom (she feels absolutely terrible for doing this, but such it is) and she will be unavailable for the next few days, family emergency, very, very sorry, but she hopes they understand. Then she pulls on her jacket and moves fast.

Lucy drives home like a NASCAR winner, praying that Noah hasn’t changed shifts and thus will be inopportunely off, but thankfully, he’s not there. She packs a quick overnight bag, grabs her passport and makes sure it’s still in date, and then practically sprints back to her car, convinced that the agents will have turned up in the fifteen minutes or so she was at home. They haven’t, but that doesn’t stop her. Feeling that all she needs is her tinfoil hat, convinced that the government is out to get her, Lucy lays rubber to SFO, parks in the economy lot, and heads in.

Once she has checked in and made it through security without being waylaid and dragged off for private questioning, she takes out her phone, opens up her texts with Noah, stares at it wondering what to possibly say, and finally taps out that she had to run a quick errand and she might be kind of late getting home. This is ridiculously inadequate, but she can’t think of anything else. It’s definitely a bad sign if you don’t tell your fiancé something like this, but. But. But.

(Nothing has made sense in Lucy’s life since Garcia Flynn walked into it less than seventy-two hours ago, and turned everything upside down.)

She waits until they call boarding, shuffles aboard with the rest of the travelers, and settles in for the long overnight ride to Istanbul. She’s brought the flash drive, but no way is she looking on it on a crowded plane, and doesn’t sleep either, listening to music and watching the glowing flight tracker edge slowly on its long way across the entire continental United States, then the Atlantic Ocean. She dozes off somewhere in this, wakes up as they’re landing in Istanbul, and is completely disoriented as she shuffles into the terminal to wait for her connection. Turns on her phone, connects to the wifi, and it basically explodes. There are thirty new messages from Noah.

Feeling horrible, Lucy pauses, then calls him on Whatsapp. He picks up on the first ring. “Lucy! Jesus! I’ve been worried out of my _mind!_ Where the hell are you? What’s going on?”

“I’m. . .” Lucy winces. “I’m kind of out of the country.”

“You. . . you what?”

“Yeah. I’m in Istanbul.”

 _“Istanbul?”_ She can almost hear his circuits overloading. “Did someone – ” it’s clear from his tone exactly who he thinks this is – “make you go with them? Do you need help? Should I – ”

“Noah, I’m sorry. It was. . . it was an accident.”

“You _accidentally flew to Turkey?”_

“I. . .” Lucy feels completely helpless to explain, especially when there is no rational or logical basis or explanation for anything she’s doing. “I’ll be – I’ll be back home soon, okay? It’s just something I need to do. I’m sorry, I swear I’ll tell you everything. It’s just. . . do you trust me?”

There’s a marked silence. Then Noah says, “You know I do. You know I want you to do whatever you need to do. But Lucy, you’re asking a lot.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for making you worry. I’ll be home soon. I swear.”

He pauses again. Finally he says, “Okay.”

“Okay.” Lucy lets out a slow breath. She can hear the lingering frost in his voice, for which she doesn’t blame him; she just spent a fairly significant chunk of their wedding budget on a last-minute international plane ticket, she didn’t tell him she was doing it, and she’s been acting weird ever since some mysterious man gatecrashed their previously happy life. Not idyllic, what with her mom and her workload and everything, but still hers. It must be pretty damn clear to Noah by now that whatever she’s told him about not thinking about or seeing Flynn again, it’s a lie. It wouldn’t be a surprise if he’s started to wonder what else she might be lying about.

“Hey,” Lucy says, trying to bridge the silence. “I love you, okay? See you soon.”

Noah blows out a breath. “Okay,” he says again. “See you soon.”

With that, they hang up, not leaving her feeling considerably better. She is well aware she couldn’t even bring herself to tell him that she’s going onward to Croatia, that Turkey isn’t her final destination, and hates herself for it. If there is a quicker way to torpedo a relationship in six easy steps (or hell, even fewer at the rate she’s going), it’s hard to think of one. And it’s Noah, why would she lose Noah, Noah’s always been great, their whole time, they –

Where did she meet him?

When did they get together?

How long have they been together?

When did he propose?

Did she even say yes?

Lucy almost freezes solid. She knows this, of course she knows this – she’s marrying him, after all. And yet, the more she searches her brain for the details, the more they elude her. It’s a terrifying feeling, even worse than waking up and thinking she didn’t know him last night. As if her entire life is built on smoke and shadows, on –

_Your life now is a lie, but not one you’d have any way of easily disproving. And not one that would hurt you, perhaps, to stay in. But if the time comes when you want answers, at least you’ll have them._

Lucy inhales a slow, ragged breath, gripping her knees so she doesn’t have a panic attack in the middle of Ataturk International Airport. She gets up and has to walk it off, which helps only marginally, and on her flight to Dubrovnik, wonders if the risks of reading _For Lucy_ in public is really a sufficient reason not to. But her world is already threatening to unravel at the seams, and she doesn’t want to pull at the thread to make it go any faster. She wants to cling to whatever sanity is left.

She lands at last, crumpled and shaken and shaky, like a used paper napkin. Manages to navigate customs and find her way into the city, which at any other time – and even now – she would be absolutely delighted to lose herself in. Dubrovnik is stunningly beautiful, with a red-roofed medieval old town and massive old walls, distant blue mountains and sparkling Adriatic Sea, resort beaches and palm trees – they film _Game of Thrones_ here, she remembers, and the place absolutely looks like the capital of some fantasy land. Her historian’s curiosity is going haywire, and she perks up a bit as she explores the narrow cobbled streets and quaint buildings. It was shelled and besieged in 1991 during the breakup of the Yugoslavian bloc, and scars remain here and there, but for the most part, it’s recovered nicely. She, however, is not here to be a tourist. She has to focus. Can’t exactly go door-to-door until she finds them.

Lucy opens up Lorena Flynn’s Facebook page, spends a while deciding where it looks like her profile picture was taken, and once she thinks she’s matched it, goes down and into a coffee shop, the kind of local java joint where someone from the neighborhood would spend a lot of time. Finds someone who speaks English, and asks if she happens to know where the Flynns live.

If she gets a funny look at that, she can’t tell. The woman hesitates briefly, asks if she’s a friend of the family. Lucy lies and says yes, hoping she doesn’t pry too closely, as she obviously will not be able to provide many details if asked, but after a moment, the woman tells her. Gives her what is definitely a Look, and sends her on her way.

Once Lucy has climbed the steep street and found the tidy townhouse at the top, she almost chickens out – which is absurd, given how far she’s already come and how many stupid things she’s already done. The barista is definitely going to let Lorena know the next time she sees her that some strange American woman was looking for her, and given the turmoil that the family is evidently already going through, the least Lucy can do is appear and own up to her insanity. She clenches a hand until it doesn’t shake, or at least less, and rings the bell.

It takes long enough to be answered that she briefly and fondly hopes that Lorena isn’t home. But then at last, footsteps. The door cracks. “Can I help you?”

Lucy clears her throat. “L-Lorena? Lorena Flynn?”

Marked silence. “Yes?”

“Can I – can I talk to you? Please?”

There’s another frosty silence. Then the door opens a further crack, revealing Lorena – yes, it’s definitely her, she looks just like her picture. But there are dark circles under her eyes, she isn’t wearing makeup, and her neatly waved hair is loose and unstyled. She pulls a sweater more tightly around herself with thin hands, regarding Lucy warily and without discernible warmth. “Can I help you?” she says again. Her accent isn’t Croatian – Spanish, as far as Lucy can tell. Her tone is polite, but it’s clear she isn’t in the mood for having her time wasted.

“I – actually, it’s about your husband.” Lucy tries to speak as gently as she can, but there’s no good way to phrase this. “He came to see me the other day. In, well, in California, in the States. I’m not sure if you know, but I don’t think he’s – ”

Something in Lorena’s face changes, not promisingly. “Lucy?” she repeats, suddenly and sharply. “Are you _Lucy?”_

“I – ” This has just taken a U-turn, and not a good one. “Well, yes, I am, but – ”

“How dare you.” Lorena’s tone remains flat, quiet, and ice-cold. Lucy has never felt such withering disdain from anyone, much less a woman she doesn’t even know. “What do you want, turning up at my home like this? To what? Gloat?”

“I – Mrs. Flynn, I don’t – ”

“Mrs. Flynn?” Lorena’s laugh is bitter and humorless. Her eyes flick to the ring on Lucy’s finger. “Are you sure about that?”

“I – ” Too late, too slowly, Lucy realizes what the other woman thinks is going on here, and is absolutely mortified. “I – Mrs. Flynn, I swear, I have never met your husband in my life. I don’t know him. He turned up at my office in America and – I don’t think he’s well, he – ”

“You don’t know him? After he kept trying to explain to me something about how he had to go see you? Because he kept talking about your journal, something about meeting you, going on some kind of mission through _time_ , God bringing you together?” Lorena’s eyes are too bright, lip trembling, but she forces herself to keep her composure. “My husband is gone for _three years_ without a word, finally strolls back in one day as if nothing happened, and he won’t stop talking about a woman named Lucy? It’s not too hard to put together the pieces!”

“Mrs. Flynn, I swear, I wasn’t on any mission with your husband. I don’t know why he chose to approach me. I thought you must be worried about him. I haven’t come here to hurt you or gloat or anything like that. I just. . .” Lucy trails off. “I wanted to know what was going on.”

Lorena studies her face for a long, excruciatingly uncomfortable moment, dark eyes cool and guarded. But at last, whatever she sees belatedly convinces her of Lucy’s sincerity. She steps back, and holds the door open.

Lucy nods in thanks, steps inside, and cautiously follows Lorena down the hall to the bright, airy kitchen at the back, with a balcony that overlooks the sea. She gingerly sinks into a chair as Lorena puts on the kettle, and makes them both a cup of tea. She opens a cupboard and takes out a tin of ginger biscuits, sets them on the table, and sits down across from Lucy. “I don’t have any answers for you,” she says. “I don’t know what happened either.”

Lucy tells her as much as she knows, which likewise isn’t a great deal, and Lorena listens with a slight frown linking her elegant brows. “Yes,” she says at last. “That’s about what he was trying to tell me. Something about. . .” She stops. “No. It’s too absurd.”

“About what?” Lucy reaches out, about to put her hand over the other woman’s, then stopping herself. “Mrs. Flynn, please tell me.”

“I. . .” Lorena gathers herself. “You’re going to laugh at me.”

“I promise, I won’t.”

“Fine. His explanation was that we – our daughter Iris and I – were. . . were killed, one night in 2014, because he found out incriminating information about an organization called Rittenhouse. That he then met you – Lucy Preston – and you were an older woman who gave him a journal that talked about a time machine, made by a place called Mason Industries.” Lorena stops again, shaking her head at the sheer nonsense she is repeating. “That he had stolen that time machine after two years of preparing for the mission, and took it through history, trying to erase Rittenhouse and bring us back, and that you – your younger self, and two men called Wyatt and Rufus – followed him, tried to stop him. But at the end you joined forces, were planning to bring down Rittenhouse, and you gave him the information to make one final trip and take out the men who had. . . had killed Iris and myself. That he did this, returned to the present, and destroyed the machine, only to find out that by changing that, that since we were alive, he had actually never stolen the machine, you hadn’t followed him, and all your adventures hadn’t really happened. That he had altered the entire structure of reality, and he was the only one who remembered.”

Lucy was braced for a doozy, as she has personal experience of Garcia Flynn’s insanity, but that is more insane than even she is remotely prepared to countenance. No wonder Lorena thinks her husband cracked up, had a midlife crisis, ran off to have a passionate affair with a pretty American professor, and has invented this cock-and-bull story as a pathetic attempt to cover his tracks. That is far, far easier to believe than, well. That. Lucy doesn’t even know where to begin. “I, ah. You’re not dead, obviously, so. Yeah.”

“Of course we aren’t dead.” Lorena sips her tea. Her shoulders are still tense, crunched, but she seems somewhat more at ease by unburdening herself of that mad fairytale, having at least had someone else to listen to it in full. “It’s been three years with nothing, no word from him, and then he walks back in and expects us to buy that? And all he can talk about is you, how you helped him do it. About how he had to go and tell you. We. . . we fought. I told him to leave, if you were the one he wanted. I. . .” Lorena trails off. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

“I’m sorry.” This time, Lucy does put her hand over Lorena’s. The older woman tenses, as if thinking about pulling away, but doesn’t. “I swear. I don’t either.”

Lorena searches her face again, still hesitant but hungry for reassurance that Lucy isn’t here to further rip apart her family, to make everything even worse. At last, she cracks a thin smile. “Well,” she says. “I have to say, that is a relief.”

“I was just. . . well, as I said, it was worrisome. I wanted to make sure you knew, if you had some way to get in contact with him.” Lucy sips her own tea, nibbles at a ginger biscuit. “If I can help, if I can sort things out between you, I’m happy to do that. I don’t know why he would choose me for his story, but. . .” She hesitates. Thinks of him asking her if she knew the man in the paper, Rufus Carlin, and the one named Wyatt Logan who gave her a hand with Agent Asshole last night. _Two men called Wyatt and Rufus._ That’s strange, but then again, this whole thing is well beyond ordinary classifications of weirdness. “Of course it’s not true.”

“Of course not.” Lorena rubs her eyes. “Garcia has always had to deal with – well, he’s done a lot of the kind of work he can’t talk about, but he’s never come up with anything like this. I’m worried about him too, but he owes me a real explanation. Owes _Iris_ a real explanation. If he could just leave her like that, he’s not the man I married, not the father I thought he was. And he doesn’t get to come back until he gives me one.”

“Well,” Lucy says. “Maybe we can find him. Get him straightened out.” She manages a smile. “It may take a lot of straightening, but we’ll see.”

Lorena glances at her again. It’s clear that she’s wondering, even if she has come around, just why Lucy would have any initiative to help a loony stranger who she doesn’t know from Adam, but she also doesn’t want to fight about it, or turn down help in what must be a very lonely struggle. Then, startling them both, the doorbell rings, and she sighs. “Excuse me.”

“Of course.” Lucy sits back, takes another ginger biscuit, and enjoys the warm Mediterranean sunshine slanting through the kitchen windows. Hears distant voices as Lorena talks to whoever is at the door. She’s taking rather a long time about it.

And then, abruptly, the voices stop. There’s a scuffle and a thump.

Lucy frowns. Gets up. “Lorena?”

No answer. She runs down the corridor. The door is wide open.

Lorena Flynn is gone.


	4. Chapter 4

Lucy spends the rest of the afternoon searching up and down for Lorena. She supposes that the thing to do would be to find the local police precinct and file a missing person report, but she can’t help but wonder if that would make it worse. It doesn’t seem at all likely that Lorena was actually intending to just pop out to the shop and has somehow forgotten to come back, but. . . Lucy doesn’t speak Croatian, would already be identified by the barista as the stranger who came in looking for Lorena, is evidently also known as the woman Lorena’s estranged husband wouldn’t shut up about, Lorena assumed she was there to flaunt their new relationship in her face, and Garcia Flynn is clearly, to say the least, a man with a checkered history. Lucy’s not a cop, but she doesn’t need to be to see how bad it looks. Like she distracted Lorena so Flynn could arrive, put a bag over her head, throw her in a car boot, and otherwise make sure the divorce was final, or that Lucy herself killed her, slipped rat poison in her tea while her back was turned and then had to scramble to hide the body, or. . . she doesn’t know. None this is of course what happened, but Lucy has heard of the Amanda Knox case. She’s not about to take chances with being a young American woman accused of murder in a foreign country, where all the evidence already helpfully points in her direction.

Finally, though, she decides that however suspicious it might look to bring this to the police’s attention, it will be several orders of magnitude worse if she doesn’t, and she didn’t come all this way just to shrug and head back to Stanford when a woman is missing. A woman who has a young daughter, and who was, if anything in Flynn’s deranged version of events is true, was at least targeted, if not killed, by a shadowy crime syndicate of some kind that clearly has no problems playing dirty. The obvious difficulty, of course, is that they might then feel perfectly entitled to do the same to Lucy, but before she left Istanbul, she sent an email to Amy explaining that she had just made a big mistake, and done exactly what she shouldn’t have. If for any reason she hasn’t gotten back or made contact in three days, Amy should call the police, the papers, and otherwise make a stink. These bastards (because Lucy at least cannot deny that there is _something_ going on here) are not going to get away with vanishing _her_ without a trace.

It takes her a while, but she finally finds a station and a cop who speaks English, and makes her report. The basic details are simple enough, but they quickly run into trouble with anything more. “How exactly did you know the victim, Mrs. Preston?”

“It’s Ms., just Ms. Preston.” Lucy has spent a lot of time recently correcting people on her title. She isn’t so full of herself as to insist on being addressed as _Dr. Preston_ outside an academic setting, and she _does_ have on an engagement ring, so it’s a logical assumption about her marital status. She almost wonders if she’s made a mistake insisting so swiftly that she’s not, if perhaps she should have thought to take it off. Lorena already thought Flynn up and ran off to randomly marry her one day, and to judge from the look on the cop’s face, at least part of that idea has also occurred to him. “And I – I didn’t really know her. Her husband came to visit me  at Stanford – California, in the States, Stanford University, I’m a professor there. You can call and check if you want. Anyway, he – he wasn’t making much sense. I thought he might not be well. He mentioned Lorena’s name, so I tracked her down on Facebook and I flew, uh, I flew here.”

The cop raises an eyebrow. “That is quite a favor to do for a stranger, Mrs. Preston.”

“It’s – ” Lucy bites her tongue. The more she points that out, the more he’s going to think she’s hiding something, more than he clearly already does. This of course is the truth, but she can hear how utterly flimsy it sounds. “It was. . . it was an unusual encounter.”

The cop flips to a new page in his notepad. “Unusual how? Can you give me the details of what this man Flynn said or did to you?”

Lucy watches his face, to see if that name is any more familiar to him than he’s letting on, but she can’t tell. And there is, of course, no way to condense anything of what happened on an otherwise unremarkable Monday morning into something that won’t spawn a hundred more questions with progressively more impossible answers. “He. . . wanted my help. With a research project he was doing. He had a few dates in history, places where he had dug up some interesting stuff and wanted me to take a look.”

“And you don’t know why he chose you to approach, of all the history professors in America.”

“No.”

“Which dates were these?”

“1754, colonial America, something to do with the French-Indian War.” Where that comes from, Lucy doesn’t know. It startles her. “And Houston 1969, the Apollo 11 moon landing, and – and Washington 1972. The Watergate scandal.”

“Ah,” the cop says. “So he’s a conspiracy theorist, yes? To prove the moon landing did not happen, anti-government paranoia, this kind of thing?”

“I. . . I don’t know. It was a short meeting. I didn’t think I’d be able to help him.”

“But it left enough of an impression on you that you decided to go find his wife?”

Lucy doesn’t have any idea how to answer that. Not when this makes no sense even to her. “I wanted to help them,” she repeats, steadily as she can. If she talks about secret agents and dead drops and strange phone calls and everything else, she is definitely in for an unpleasantly close-range inspection of Croatia’s formerly-Soviet justice system, which isn’t likely to be a good time. “Their daughter, is she all right? She must be home from school or wherever by now. I don’t want her sitting alone, wondering where her mother is.”

“The girl is staying with a neighbor. They phoned to report Mrs. Flynn missing shortly before you arrived.” The cop considers her again. “Are you familiar with the daughter?”

“No, I’ve never met her.” Lucy twists her fingers in her lap. For the oddest and most inexplicable moment, she had some kind of – flashback, hallucination, memory, what? Reading a file. Something about Flynn’s family. Something related to something he did in 1969 – but how does that even make sense? He’s probably in his mid-forties if she had to guess, he would either not yet be born in 1969, or only a very small child. Even more bewildering and alarming is Lucy’s momentary conviction that _she_ was there too. In 1969, when she _definitely_ wasn’t born. The moon landing. She just mentioned that, not knowing why. Jesus, what is happening to her?

It must show on her face somehow, and this, obviously, is not the thing to convince the cop of her status as a reliable, sane, well-balanced, and definitely not-murdery individual, and he briefly looks as if he’s thinking about keeping her for more. But it seems he can’t do that without formally arraigning her or filing a charge of some kind, and there is nothing concrete to do so with. “Very well, Mrs. Preston. While this is going on, it is a good idea that you do not try to leave Croatia. We will have to find you if we have more questions.”

“I – I have a job, I need to be back by Monday – ”

The cop gives her a look that clearly says that if she didn’t want to fuck up her life, maybe she shouldn’t have jaunted off here and whacked the wife of the man she may or may not be illicitly involved with. But after Lucy signs an affidavit (all the alarm bells going off in her head about signing documents you don’t understand without a lawyer present, but not seeing any other way she’s going to be allowed to leave tonight) she is finally released, not feeling at all better about that decision than she did at the start. She could call Noah, especially if she might be about to need bail money, see what the dollar-to-euro exchange rate is going at these days, but. . . as much as she tries to wrestle away her inexplicable reluctance to do it, she can’t. She still can’t remember when exactly they got together, or how. These gaps and flashes in her memory, as if someone has taken a pair of scissors, cut out bits, and badly stitched in others, are terrifying.

Pulling up her hood against the chilly evening wind off the water, Lucy starts to walk. She has no idea where exactly she is going. There has to be a cheap and reasonably non-skeevy guesthouse around here somewhere, and considering her current circumstances, she really does not want to be alone on the streets after dark – especially as a young woman in a foreign country where she doesn’t speak the language. It’s hard to feel more vulnerable, and she reaches into her purse in search of the pepper spray she usually keeps in there, in case she needs it. Then she remembers, of course, that she had to throw it away going through security at SFO, and groans out loud. Bang-up job, TSA. Really keeping America and its citizens safe.

She should at least buy a cheap phone of some sort. Is anywhere still open? She doesn’t want to get socked with international roaming charges every time she turns on her own, even just to use the wifi, and besides, it would be detrimental to her aims of avoiding contact with her worried family. This is so unlike Lucy, the girl who always asked permission to go anywhere in high school and actually worried about breaking her curfew, that she has to wonder if she has somehow had a personality transplant. All these flitting, ghostlike half-memories, the inability to remember the most intimate details of her life or Noah’s. . . like she’s changed bodies with someone, like another version of herself. Or in other words, exactly what it sounded like Flynn was talking about, and she thought he was crazy, the first time they met. And according to him, the last. Of course he’s disappeared, right when she needs to actually talk to him, right when Lorena has too, when –

Just then, headlights fall over the street, a car rattles down the cobblestones, and slows next to Lucy. The window hums down. “Dr. Preston?”

It’s a woman’s voice, American. Yes, because this has not happened nearly enough in recent days, a random stranger wants to talk to her. At least this one has gotten the title right. In the low glow of the streetlight, Lucy can see that she’s older, silver-streaked black hair tidily cut to her shoulders, dark eyes, and a commanding manner. “Dr. Preston,” she says again. “Is that you?”

Lucy debates making a run for it, not that she can outstrip a car on foot, and this is not a wise thing to do when she is already the prime suspect in a missing-person case. But she somehow trusts this newcomer more than she did the other ones, and she isn’t exactly overflowing on options to start with. After a moment, she turns. “Yes?” she says warily.

“Agent Denise Christopher.” The woman holds out a hand. “I’m with Homeland Security. You can get into the car, Lucy, it’s all right. You’ve had an eventful few days, haven’t you?”

Lucy balks. “Have you been following me?”

“We had someone keep an eye on you when you left San Francisco, yes. Why don’t you get in, and we’ll talk.”

 _Never get into a car with someone you don’t know,_ the fourth-grade “Stranger Danger” VHS tape drones unhelpfully in Lucy’s head. But Agent Christopher doesn’t look like a hitman (or rather, hitwoman) – not that that means anything, as she probably wouldn’t. And Lucy is tired, sore, shaken, very confused, and very much in need of an answer or five.

She gets into the car.

Denise – Agent Christopher, why did she seem familiar, first-name, for a moment? – smiles and swings behind the wheel, evidently pleased that Lucy decided not to make this difficult. Lucy glances into the back seat, but there doesn’t appear to be anyone else there, just them. Agent Christopher shifts into gear, and they roll down the street to the main ring road, then out onto the motorway. They are clearly going somewhere, and Lucy bites back the inane impulse to object that she isn’t supposed to leave Croatia. She still somehow fears getting into more trouble, though that event horizon seems to have been passed a while ago, and all of this is so utterly, unrelentingly bizarre that she has finally given up fighting it, is just going to have to throw up her hands and go with it. Alice woke up eventually, and discovered that Wonderland was just a dream. Lucy only hopes she’ll get to do the same.

At last, when they have been driving for almost forty minutes and have left Dubrovnik well behind, Agent Christopher speaks. “Do you know Garcia Flynn?”

Lucy had a hunch that question might be coming, and she still has no idea how to answer it. She mulls her words carefully. Christopher wouldn’t be asking that unless she already knew that Lucy met and spoke to him, and denying it outright is clearly not going to work. At last she says neutrally, “He seems to think I did.”

Christopher glances at her swiftly sidelong. It’s difficult to say if this was the answer she expected or not. “Do you want to confirm that you saw him in the morning of Monday, February 20? On the Stanford University campus, I believe?”

“I. . .” Lucy is getting tired of law enforcement officers thinking she’s in cahoots with this nutjob. “Fine. Yes. He came to visit me. We spoke briefly. Then he left.”

“Did you know that Garcia Flynn is wanted by the United States government, on suspicion of unprecedented terrorist activities and connections?”

That catches Lucy like a bag of rocks across the midsection. She should have guessed, and indeed she had more than an inkling that something like this was the case, but maybe she really has had an unfathomably lucky escape. “Unprecedented?”

“Yes. This isn’t just a matter of blowing up a building or driving a truck through a crowd or gunning down some innocent people on a beach or anything like that. This man is a danger to our very existence.”

“What – what is he supposed to have done?”

“That,” says Agent Christopher, “is the difficult part.”

“I work at Stanford. I’m pretty sure I can handle difficult.”

Again, that oblique sidelong glance. “So you don’t have any idea?”

“Would I be asking if I did?” Lucy’s frustration shows in her voice. She can’t help it.

“I suppose not.” Christopher overtakes a dawdler in the fast lane. “It’s complicated, because strictly speaking, we can’t _prove_ any of it. But in the short version, he was responsible for destroying a unique, priceless, and irreplaceable machine made by a company called Mason Industries, in – you’ve heard of them?”

“I.” Lucy swallows. “I only saw the newspaper article. He – Flynn – asked me if I know someone named Rufus Carlin. I don’t.”

One of Christopher’s dark brows arches. “Rufus Carlin, in fact, shared some very disturbing data with Connor Mason, the CEO and founder of the company, and the inventor of the machine that Flynn destroyed. As a result, this data made its way to my colleagues and myself in Homeland Security, and believe me when I say that the apprehension of Garcia Flynn is now the highest-priority case on the entire federal counter-terrorism docket. If you have any idea or lead on his whereabouts, now would be the time to share it.”

“I don’t,” Lucy insists, with something close to panic. “I don’t know where he is.”

Christopher evaluates her a moment more, finally decides that she’s telling the truth. Then she says, “Well, as it happens, we might. It seems he has an older half-brother named Gabriel Thompkins –which is strange, we went through his files several times and there was never any mention of him before. It’s like he just appeared out of thin air. At any rate, he lives in Paris. Given Flynn’s recent pattern of trying to make contact with a list of personal or family targets, we think he might next attempt to check in on Gabriel. But this man is trained and dangerous, backed into a corner, and is certainly expecting to be tailed, as well as prepared for a fight. We need an incentive for him to show himself, draw him out of cover, and put him off his guard.”

“And?” Lucy doesn’t like where this is going. “What does this have to do with me?”

“Come now, Lucy.” Agent Christopher exits the motorway onto a country road, takes a few turns. It’s only as they pass through a jungle of barbed wire onto a dark airstrip, with a private jet sitting on the tarmac, that Lucy realizes they must be at some kind of hidden black site, and that that, right there, is their ride. “Do you _really_ think he’s going to miss the opportunity to talk to you?”

* * *

Paris, France – City of Lights, home of poets and artists, legendary romantic destination, etc. etc. – is a fucking shithole.

To be fair, Garcia Flynn’s current low opinion of the place might directly and inversely correlate to his level of anxiety about why he’s here at all, and the unpleasant encounter he just had with so-called French customer service (he hates to stereotype, especially as someone from Eastern Europe who gets plenty of that himself, but sometimes it just _fits)._ He has been trying for the last forty-five minutes to see if his brother is here or not, not even sure if he wants to find him, existing in a sort of terrified exhilaration and mind racing too fast to wrap around the consequences. This, he supposes, is what he gets for shooting scientists, instead of asking their advice on what destroying the Mothership might do to reality. But he remembers Anthony, at one point, describing the space-time continuum as similar to a piece of chewed gum. Pull on it from either end, and it first starts to split in the middle. That’s where reality is starting to tear back into what already happened, the changes that Flynn and the trio made, despite the attempt to reset it to the original template by saving his family. He’s been keeping an eye on history, and 1969 – that was about the middle of the expeditions that they went on, yes. That’s about where the hasty patch job would start to pull out its stitches. The official account of the moon landing has suddenly altered, explaining how there was a mysterious attack on NASA’s computers and Katherine Johnson helped save the day. And that means the _other_ change Flynn made back then, saving his half-brother’s life, might have returned into history as well.

Flynn can’t help but think of the fact that if the rips are going to start cascading back into existence, like a chain of knocked-over dominoes, that means everyone who is alive and present right now who shouldn’t be – Lorena, Iris, Anthony, Lucy’s sister Amy, just to name a few – is going to start disappearing, depending on when the correction hits. If his half-brother is back, that means it’s happening. That means this time, there is no Mothership to fix it, and trying again might just make the temporal destabilization even worse, riddle it with holes and contradictions until the entire thing collapses, like a sand castle gutted by the waves. That means that he might lose his family again, right before his eyes, with absolutely no way to stop it.

Flynn swears, banging his fist against the wall of the telephone booth, as a few passersby give him a funny look and walk faster. It’s already bad enough that he has pissed off Rittenhouse to a degree unseen in the organization’s sordid history, that they’ve warned him to stay away from his family and Lucy and everyone else, and yet he needs to do something, he needs to warn them. He doesn’t dare go back to Dubrovnik, as the place is probably saturated with agents already, happy to shoot Lorena and Iris through a long-range sniper rifle if he so much as shows his face, but he thinks madly that if he could just kill _those_ ones, the ones threatening them now, then they’d be safe, they’d be –

For another, oh, five minutes. Until Rittenhouse sends more. Sends their entire fucking private army.

Is he planning to shoot those too, and think there will be no retribution?

It never stops.

 _It never_ _stops._

Fingers shaking, he dials the directory again, waiting. It takes a while, but this time he finally gets an address for a Gabriel Thompkins. It’s in a tony, upscale part of the city, second arrondissement, not far from the Louvre. He slams down the phone and pulls his jacket straight, checking that it covers his sidearm – he is really not in the mood to be dragged into the gendarmerie just now – and starts to move fast. What he’s going to say, if anything, he has no idea. _I’m your half-brother, who technically you never met, because you died before I was born?_ Is it possible this is like a badly tuned radio, and Gabriel will flicker out of existence again before he gets there, reality caught between two competing parameters, battling to decide which one is going to take precedence? Jesus. What has he done.

Flynn makes it across the city in record time, turning into the narrow street, shoving past the inevitable brigade of Vespas, delivery vans, and sidewalk café chairs, up to the flat. He rings the bell, looks behind him shiftily, and then hammers on the door. Someone shouts something that sounds unflattering from the second-floor balcony (Flynn’s French isn’t quite as good as his Spanish, but more than sufficient in this case). “Come on,” he growls under his breath. “Don’t you need to go get your single espresso and smoke your cigarette and read _Le Monde?”_

His interesting ideas about what constitutes a typical Parisian’s life aside, this does in fact get a response. There are footsteps in the hall behind, and the door opens. _“Oui? Puis-je vous aider?”_

Flynn opens his mouth, then shuts it, because he’s momentarily spellbound. It’s looking at himself, about ten years older. Dark hair considerably shot through with silver, square glasses, smile lines, sweater and corduroys. Gabriel Thompkins looks like a retired college professor or a successful novelist, the kind of man who has spent his life creating things, not tearing them down. There is a wedding ring on his finger. He has a family. A good life. Flynn remembers jabbing a shot of epinephrine into a small boy’s arm, a muggy July day in 1969, looking into his younger mother’s face, telling her that he only ever remembered her being sad. That he wanted to fix it. _It was good to see you again_. He tries to answer, but he can’t. It sticks raw.

“Can I help you?” Thompkins repeats, this time in English, as if Flynn might not have understood the first time. His brow creases, as it’s not every day a shifty-eyed stranger who looks very much like you turns up in a fluster on your doorstep. “You look – sir, have we. . . have we met?”

“A long time ago,” Flynn says by reflex. He still feels punched. “I – I can’t really explain, I’m sorry. I just – I probably should not have come.” He wants to ask, wants to know what it was like to grow up with their mother, happy, but doesn’t know if Gabriel’s memory includes him or not. He doesn’t know how this works. Lorena and Iris only remembered three years of his absence. “I – I’m sorry for bothering you. If someone comes by, you – I was not here.”

With that, leaving Thompkins utterly baffled, Flynn whirls on his heel and retreats, thinking far too late that he’s likewise pointed out someone else for Rittenhouse to target, that if a team of commandos arrive tonight to drag Thompkins out of his tidy flat and shoot him in the head, there will be nobody to point the finger at but himself. He blunders down the Rue Bachaumont in complete distraction, half-seriously thinking of jumping into the Seine to put an end to this unqualified disaster, this burning dumpster fire, that is his life. They ordered him to disappear, and perhaps that is the only helpful thing left for him to do. Will that buy his family’s safety, once his corpse washes up in some river grate weeks from now and they have to identify him by his dental records? From Rittenhouse, perhaps. But if the timeline keeps buckling in under the weight of its contradictions, if people disappear and reappear, if –

Flynn turns the corner, and walks straight into Lucy Preston.

 _Shock_ is not a sufficient word for either of their reactions. They collide, start into the usual apologies for knocking heads with a stranger, then stagger backward, get a good look at each other, and blanch. Neither of them appear capable of thought or movement or speech. Then Flynn grabs her by both wrists, jerks her bodily off the sidewalk, swings her around under the cover of a low market awning, and hisses, “What the _hell_ are you doing here?”

Belatedly, it occurs to him that if he wants to convince her of his noble intentions, this is a piss-poor way to start, and it would not be best for someone to see it and get the wrong impression (and, he supposes grimly, this isn’t the first time he’s kidnapped her). She pulls at his hands, trying to loosen his grip, and he lets her down. The two of them are still standing close together in the small space, and he feels an odd lurch in his stomach as their eyes lock. She takes a moment to catch her breath; if she _was_ expecting to run into him here, clearly it was not nearly that dramatically. Then she says, “We need to talk.”

“Do we?” Flynn glances edgily over his shoulder again.

“Yes.” He has to give her credit, she doesn’t back down or flinch, staring him in the eye, which sometimes not even grown men have been able to manage. “And we don’t have much time. Is it true? Are you – ” She hesitates, but only briefly. “Are you a terrorist?”

That’s quite the icebreaker to go for, Flynn thinks. Though he does, by any objective metric, deserve it. He knows she doesn’t remember, but he has a brief moment of useless longing for when that meant she would touch his hand gently and tell him she was sorry for his loss, not revert to seeing him as the hulking monster determined to wreak havoc on her nice ordinary normal world. “Who have you been talking to, Lucy?”

“People.” She looks at him defiantly. “And they’re here. In Paris. Looking for you. They’re using me as bait to try to draw you out. They’ll be here soon.”

“Wh – ” Flynn’s hand goes by reflex to his gun. He grabs Lucy by the wrist again and pulls her backward into the crammed alley, her ending up almost against his chest. “Who’s looking for me?” he hisses at her. _“Who?”_

“Homeland Security.” She pushes herself off him and glares. “You know, I’m more than slightly tempted to let them catch you.”

“Homeland Security?” Flynn swears. “You mean Rittenhouse? They’ve infiltrated every level of that department, it’s a nightmare, it’s – ”

“What?” Lucy is exasperated. “Rittenhouse?”

“Yes, Lucy! _Rittenhouse!”_ He almost yells it at her, the same conceit observed by someone trying in vain to make someone else understand, as if saying it louder and louder will make a difference. Absolutely nothing about this new timeline is the way he wanted it to be, and he hates himself for almost wishing that he hadn’t done it. He can’t regret that Lorena and Iris are alive again, but otherwise, it is the very epitome of being careful what you wish for. “Do we have to go through this again? You didn’t believe me when I told you that they existed last time either!”

Lucy stares at him, lips white, and he belatedly thinks that if her interest in hearing him out, and buying them a little time, is the only thing stopping Homeland Security from moving in to nab him on the spot, it would _possibly_ behoove him to have more tact about this than a Panzer brigade. “Rittenhouse,” he repeats, more levelly. “Ask your _friends_ about that.”

“They’re not my friends.” Lucy is scurrying to keep up with him as he barges down the alley, hoping that this does not come to a shootout in the middle of a nice Paris neighborhood – the city has too much unfortunate recent experience with that kind of thing – but also not planning to be taken quietly. He doesn’t know why. Ten minutes ago he was prepared to drown himself in the Seine and put an end to it, but now he’s seen her again, she’s here, she doesn’t know the danger she’s in, what happened to all of them and might still, and somehow, something in him isn’t quite ready to give up the fight after all. He pushes open an unlocked back door, pulling her in after him. They appear to be in the stock room of a patisserie, which smells delicious if nothing else, and he briefly wonders that if he’s already a wanted criminal, if stealing a brioche or a pain du chocolat is really going to make that much of a difference. He reaches behind her ear, fingers brushing her hair, and finds the small crumple of a smart-foil GPS tracker, peeling it off her.

Lucy stares at him, clearly wanting to ask how he knew that was there. “How did you get to France?” she demands instead. “They have a warrant on you, they – ”

“I used to work for the NSA, do you really think I don’t know how to get out of a country with the authorities looking for me?” Flynn hisses, peering through the crates. Seems clear, but he hopes the baker does not come in unexpectedly; his trigger finger is a little itchy right now. He leads the way around, Lucy following him almost despite herself, drawn into his orbit like a star devoured by a black hole. “I don’t suppose you did anything useful, and read that file I gave you?”

“I’ve been a little busy!” Lucy remembers to keep her voice down, but that is one of the more scathing whispers Flynn has ever heard. “Your wife’s missing!”

 _That_ takes him like a skillet in the back of the head. “She – she _what?”_

“I went. To Dubrovnik.” Lucy’s eyes meet his, half guiltily, half defiantly. “I met your wife. She told me what you think happened. And then she. . . she vanished. I don’t know how or why.”

Garcia Flynn knows several languages. Quite a few, in fact. English, Croatian, Russian, Spanish, German, and some French and Italian. But there are not enough curses in all of them to adequately convey what flashes through his head just then. He wants to shake her, to demand what on earth made her do that, even as he is horribly aware that all of this, every bit of it, is his fault. He was the one who insisted on seeing her one last time, introducing that element of chaos and danger into what otherwise would have been her boring life with her boring fiancé and boring problems. And nor can he know if Lorena has been taken in strategically by Rittenhouse, to hold as hostage against him – which would be bad enough, but still allow for the possibility of rescuing her – or if she’s vanished more permanently, a casualty of the ripping space-time, the world remembering that she is supposed to be dead and adjusting matters accordingly. He presses a hand against the wall, struggling to control himself. He should not be surprised that by trying to save everyone, he’s losing them dramatically and spectacularly instead. And more. And worse. This is going to gain momentum. It’s not going to stop.

Just then, there’s a thump in the next room, and Flynn remembers that they’re still standing here like idiots, right next to Lucy’s tracker – even if he’s taken it off her, that does him no good unless they get away from it. He grabs her, practically tucking her under his arm like someone stealing a valuable vase from an antique bazaar, and pulls her back out the door into the alley. Just as it bursts open after them, and someone yells, “Come out with your hands up!”

Flynn responds to that by shooting, which is how Flynn tends to respond to most things in general. He doesn’t think he’s hit them, unfortunately, as there is the sound of shattering glass but no yells or cries of pain, and Lucy stares at him with her mouth open. He thinks blackly that she’s getting her answer as to whether or not he’s a terrorist, all right. Then he grabs her again, pushing her up the alley in front of him, and wheels to fire one more time from around the corner. Then he jumps onto the nearest of the ubiquitous Vespas, pulls Lucy down in front of him, and reaches around her to hotwire it, gunning it to life within thirty seconds (he might admire his own efficiency, if there was time to do so). Kicks off, and races away down the street at top speed.

Lucy is too involved in clinging on for dear life to scream at him, though Flynn is sure she will get to that part soon enough. He more or less knows Paris, though it’s not the city he spent the most time in, and he also has a few tricks up his sleeve. He knows they won’t risk shooting at a moving target in the middle of boulevards and plazas packed with tourists and civilians (or hopes so, at least) and they’ll have to catch him first if they intend to take him down.

He does not intend to let them. He dodges and weaves and throttles still harder, earning more than a few French obscenities and succinct gestures thrown in his direction, but he doesn’t care. Half the other Vespas are driving at the same pace, anyway, and without the tracker, it will be difficult for their pursuers to get a bead on theirs particularly in a city packed with the stupid things. Lucy is probably sorely regretting the moment she ever thought this was a good idea, but likewise, Flynn will have to worry about that later. He wants to tell her that if she trusted him to take her home through time, this should be nothing, but – for the third time in his life – this Lucy Preston is not the Lucy he has known. You’d think he’d get used to it.

He isn’t used to it.

They zip and dart and zigzag across Paris like a demented bumblebee for God only knows how long. At last, when they have gotten far enough away that the sirens have faded, all seems more or less tranquil, and nobody appears to be looking at them, Flynn lets the stolen scooter coast to a halt in a side alley. Lucy is gasping, clinging to the handlebars, and there is an excruciatingly tense moment as they stare at each other. The silence becomes overwhelming. Then at last, eyes flat, lips set, Lucy wipes her brow with her forearm and throws her shoulders back.

“Right,” she says quietly, furiously. “Talk.”


	5. Chapter 5

Wyatt Logan’s first impression of the place is that it looks like a huge blue aquarium with the water drained out, walls of glass for the crowds to press in and gawk, the trained whales doing tricks for their captors and everyone hoping you don’t spend too long thinking about whether this is, strictly speaking, entirely ethical. He’s been rousted out of bed (well, the couch, with the TV still on and droning SportsCenter) and driven here, while the person on the other end of the phone had that harried sound to their voice that usually means a VIP was shot or a building’s been blown up. They said they needed him, and they said they needed him ASAP. He might be on leave, but he’s still Delta Force. No choice but to pull on his pants, grab a Red Bull, and go.

Now, as Wyatt’s shown into the conference room and shakes hands with a lot of identity-badged government types, surreptitiously checking his breath to make sure it doesn’t smell too much like alcohol and biting his tongue on the questions that he knows won’t get an answer. Yet, at any rate. This has all the hallmarks of a rapid-response mission debrief, and while it might be good to get his head back in the game, Wyatt can’t help but wonder why they picked him. His last review with the Pendleton brass ended with the gentle but pointed recommendation that he could use some time away from the service. They know the thing with Jessica has been hard. (Hah. They _know it’s been hard.)_ So he’s been doing – not a whole hell of a lot. Sports talk shows. Cheap beer. Sitting on the couch. Staring at the wall. Maybe a mission is just what he needs.

The rest of the government types make their entrance, along with Connor Mason, the smarmy British CEO of the company whose premises Homeland Security seems to have swiped. Wyatt’s heard of these guys. They were just in the paper for some big cutting-edge engineering project. He glances at Mason’s assistant or techie or whatever he is, who he vaguely remembers in the haze of hurried introductions as Rufus, Rufus Carlin. Wyatt has a momentarily impulse to wave to him. He clenches his fist until it goes away.

The security shades are lowered, and the briefing starts. As Wyatt guessed, it’s indeed a mission, and moreover, they are quite insistent on it being him who does it. He charitably holds back on the obvious objections this raises, but when they get to the main problem, he can’t. “What? Are you _serious?_ You’re trying to apprehend a terrorist suspect, and your big plan is to send an untrained woman, an unarmed civilian, in with just a GPS tracker _by herself?_ No wonder she got kidnapped! I’m shocked she didn’t get killed!”

“Mr. Logan, given the intelligence available, and the particularity of the situation, we considered the options and decided it was the best available.”

Wyatt whistles. “Wow. I really don’t want to know what the others were then, do I? Chickens on fire? A big sign telling any terrorists to stand with their hands up until the cops got there?”

“We realize that on face value, this was a risk.” The agent looks him coolly, as if they're not going to sit here and be questioned by him. “However – ”

“I’m not asking all of you to think like special ops – and for that matter, I would have been raked over the coals and probably booted out on the spot if I’d ever suggested that plan to a superior with a straight face. I am not even asking you to be highly trained risk managers. I’m asking whether it ever occurred to you for one fucking second that this was like giving an angry baboon a Tommy gun: that the outcome was both terrible and idiotically avoidable.”

“Mr. Logan, we made a decision – ”

“Stupid,” Wyatt says. “Let’s be clear. You made a stupid decision.”

Rufus Carlin coughs. It sounds as if it might be intended to conceal a laugh. Whatever, Wyatt didn’t come here to be the Jon Stewart of late-night security crises, but he’s really not in the mood for this. It almost sounds like a bad joke, since surely no credible intelligence agency would have made that decision with a straight face. It would only remotely have a chance of working if there was a personal connection of some sort between the suspect and the victim, if they could set it up as a sting. But if this woman knows terrorists on enough of a familiar basis to make her an option to catch one, why haven’t they –

“Do I even get to know who she is?” Wyatt asks. “This woman that you clowns decided to dangle out for bait?”

Glances are exchanged. They seem to be debating it. Then one says, “Her name is Dr. Lucy Preston. She’s a history professor at Stanford.”

Wyatt’s heart inexplicably  skips a beat. They click a photo up onto the screen, and yes, it’s her, the brunette he met the other night, being hassled by more of these award-winning geniuses. Or at least, he thinks it might have been them, since all the sunglasses-and-suits types look alike. He did flash them his Army ID card, so that might be backfiring on him now, if they are having their revenge by making him clean up their messes. Damned if he knows how that works, but still. For some reason he wasn’t prepared for and doesn’t understand, this catches him off guard. If it’s Lucy – Dr. Preston – who’s been snatched by this weirdo, Wyatt isn’t quite as disinterested in the whole clusterfuck as he was a moment ago. Hell if he knows why.

“Ah,” he says, doing his best to sound neutral. “And who has her?”

“His name,” says the lead agent, the beefy, bearded one who Wyatt recalls as Neville, Jake Neville, “is Flynn.”

Wyatt, for an even more baffling instant, is convinced he knows exactly who that is. Has an odd memory of sitting in an apartment, talking to a woman, telling her that the man was a Russian spy – only for him to see Flynn (was it Flynn?) outside, jabbing something into a boy’s arm. He thought it was poison, some kind of drug or other malicious substance, but it turned out to be epinephrine. Saved the kid from dying of an allergic reaction to the bee sting, said something to the woman, and jumped off the balcony. Wyatt got a few shots off at him, but he managed to drive away. Car. Black car. Kind of vintage-looking. Why does this memory feel – not quite present? Aside from the fact that it’s not even a memory, seeing as it never happened, and it’s strong enough to make Wyatt rub his eyes and briefly wonder if he fell asleep, had some kind of intense and localized dream. What the hell.

“And,” he says after a moment, realizing they’re looking at him, “you want me to go after him. Again. By myself. Because either you don’t have enough of a budget to pay for more than one operative on your exfil missions, or there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Would you say you’re familiar with Mr. Flynn? Or Dr. Preston?”

Wyatt opens his mouth to say no, of course he isn’t, but something stops him. It’s at the least unfair to Lucy _(Dr. Preston,_ he reminds himself again, he doesn’t _know_ the woman) to let her suffer for the total incompetence of the feds, and he’d kind of like to have a clear shot at this jackoff himself, even if he doesn’t know why. And while they’d again be sending only one person to deal with a clearly dangerous man, a trained Delta Force operative is not the same as an unarmed academic when it comes to such things. Wyatt can’t believe he’s considering it, when thirty minutes ago this sounded like the worst idea he’d ever heard, but. . .

“So what?” he says abruptly. “I get on the plane to Paris, you drop me in, I find these two, I rescue her – what are my orders in regard to him?”

More glances. Then Agent Neville says, “Frankly, Mr. Logan, we would normally issue kill-on-sight instructions for this man. What he has done, and what he will do – there’s no room for any wishy-washy hand-wringing about it. He deserves to die. But as it happens, we need him alive.”

“Questioning?” That one’s pretty obvious. “You really think you’re gonna make him talk?”

Neville smiles, a bit unpleasantly. “Oh, I think we could, if we put our minds to it.”

Wyatt looks away. He has captured suspects before with the implicit knowledge that they’ll be submitted to “extraordinary rendition” or “enhanced interrogation” or whatever Orwellian gobbledygook they’re calling it these days, and he also knows that as a soldier, you don’t enlist because you think you’ll always have the luxury of accepting missions that you are personally morally comfortable with. Flynn _is_ clearly dangerous, he’s on the run in Paris with Lucy (Wyatt gives up trying to call her _Dr. Preston_ in his head) and frankly, right now, if the brass says jump, Wyatt has to ask how high. He can tell this is a test. They’re sending him, and only him, because if he fails, they’ll have all the excuse they need to chuck him out permanently. Dishonorable discharge, no pension. Good luck getting a civilian job after over fifteen years in the service, training for classified missions and serving in conflict zones. And something more. Something else. Whatever is happening when he had those bizarre flashes of non-memory, and his conviction that he knows these people – knows both of them – better than he understands.

Wyatt takes a moment to consider all this. He’s not in a huge rush to accept, but he also can tell that it’s going to get finicky for him, fast, if he refuses. What exactly does he have to go back to? A sagging sofa crumbled with corn chips and more bad dreams about Jessica? At least this way he’s doing something. At least this way he doesn’t feel completely and irredeemably useless.

They look at him. They seem to be waiting on his answer.

Wyatt blows out a breath. There are still any number of sardonic comments to be made about him saving their asses from their own breathtaking stupidity, but he also senses that they aren’t going to help him very much. Lucy is probably tied up in some squalid basement with a lunatic. He gets her safe. Then he worries about Flynn.

“Fine,” he says. Shrugs. _“Bonjour, Paris.”_

* * *

Lucy is, in fact, sitting on a narrow bed in a garret that looks like a poet or three definitely died of consumption here in the nineteenth century, waiting for Flynn to get back with dinner – she ordered him that if he was going to haul her off, he was at least going to feed her. He gave her a black look, but complied, and has been gone for the last thirty minutes in search of takeout. She wonders if he’s been captured; they have to have put out an alert for him across the city. She isn’t sure if she wants that to have happened or not.

She wanders to the grimy window, judging the possibility of opening it and escaping across the rooftops, but it’s three stories down to the alley below, she doesn’t want to take chances climbing out as she is known to not be the most graceful or coordinated person in the world, and she isn’t sure where she’d go even if she did. Besides, she hasn’t endured this much hassle, most of it caused by him, to just turn and leave when potential answers might finally be in her grasp. It’s possible he is in fact going to hurt her, but for better or worse, she doesn’t get that sense. Hurt everyone else, yes, and gladly. Not her. This doesn’t make him a good man, or a safe one. But at the moment, he is the best, and possibly the only, choice she has.

Just to be sure, she checks the door. It is assuredly still locked. She isn’t planning on hanging around if he turns rabid, but she’ll have to think of a good plan later. Instead she stands by the window, affecting casualness, as the city gets dark outside and the lights come on. It’d be beautiful, if she wasn’t, you know. Where she was.

At last, the key finally rattles, the door bumps and creaks open with a shower of dust, and Flynn ducks through, slamming it behind him. When he’s ensured it’s locked, he throws a bag at her, which Lucy just manages to catch. “There,” he says, sounding put-upon. “Dinner.”

“Can’t just kidnap a woman in peace, can you?” Lucy says coldly. It smells delicious, but she doesn’t want to tear into it too quickly, even though she’s starving. “This is such an inconvenience for _you,_ isn’t it?”

He actually looks surprised, and for a moment, slightly ashamed. Then he shrugs. “You aren’t a prisoner, Lucy. As I told you ninety years ago in this same city. You’re welcome to leave if you want. But I don’t think you will.”

“Ninety years ago – ?”

He shrugs again, jimmying the ancient light switch until it pops on. “1927. We were here. You talked me into letting Charles Lindbergh live, see if he could change. He still ended up being a dick. So in case you were wondering, you were wrong about that.”

Lucy stares at him. Any possible response to this statement – well, there really isn’t any possible response to that statement. “Yeah,” she says at last. “I spent a lot of time wondering if I talked you out of murdering Charles Lindbergh in 1927.”

Flynn sits down on the creaky chair across from her. He’s so tall that they’re still almost eye to eye, and she folds her arms involuntarily, wanting some air of authority, however feigned. “You really didn’t read the file?”

“Was I supposed to have time while you were stealing a scooter, breaking into a bakery, and shooting at government agents?” Lucy finally sits as well, back on the bed, opening the bag and pulling out whatever savory-smelling item is inside. “Or didn’t that come until later?”

Flynn has the grace to look slightly chagrined, though that isn’t very much. “Have you figured it out?” he says instead. “Smart woman like you?”

“Maybe.” Lucy looks at him stonily. “You not only think we know each other, you think we’re some sort of – I don’t know what.  A bit like. . . time travelers.”

“Actually,” Flynn says, with the air of someone commenting on the weather. “Exactly like time travelers.”

Lucy blinks. “And you just – what? _Tell_ people that?”

“You’re the one interested in preserving your precious past, Lucy. Not me.”

“It’s not _my_ precious past!” Good god, this man is the most confounding and frustrating person she has ever met, which she is swiftly remembering (and regretting) after her decision to try to get information out of him. “It’s just. . . history!”

“History,” Flynn says, “can be changed.”

“How?”

He eyes her, as if wondering how much trouble he is actually going to go to in order to explain this. Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a few folded sheets of paper – which, when Lucy opens it, proves to be a photocopy of some kind of handwritten book. Some kind of handwritten book that looks like. . . _her_ handwriting.

“The journal itself doesn’t exist any more,” Flynn says, by way of apparent (non)-explanation. “You never had any reason to write it. But I copied some of it before I went, and. . . that’s the basic gist of it. Are you going to tell me that none of it is at all familiar?”

Lucy stares at it. She can’t deny that it does look like her handwriting, and he is watching her impatiently, as if they’ve done this already once before and he wants to just skip to the part where she believes him. Names leap out at her from the page. _Mason Industries. Mothership. Lifeboat. Garcia Flynn. Wyatt Logan. Rufus Carlin._

_Rittenhouse._

“So,” she says at last, when she’s reasonably confident her voice will be level. “That’s your big story. That Mason Industries invented a time machine – two time machines, actually. You stole one of them – why doesn’t that part surprise me? – and Wyatt Logan, Rufus Carlin, and I used the other one to try to stop you from taking down all of history.”

“Not history,” Flynn says flatly. “Rittenhouse.”

“Right. Creepy secret society. Your mortal enemy.” Lucy looks at him with that same flatness. “I’ll admit,” she says at last, “that if you were going to make up that story, you’d probably put a more favourable spin on it for yourself. But you have to know this sounds utterly deranged.”

“I’m not interested in arguing about whether it’s true, Lucy. It is. You know the part in the stories when magic starts happening, where the token rational character insists that there’s some normal explanation for what’s going on, that there’s nothing out of the ordinary? That everyone else is just making things up? You know how that character is always wrong?” His eyes are dark as two pits, depthless. “How about we just agree that you skip that part?”

“But – ”

“Let me guess,” Flynn says. “You’ve been having strange memories about Houston,1969. About thinking you were there, that you had something to do with the moon landing, even as that scholar’s brain of yours tells you that you hadn’t. And either 1754 or 1934. Maybe, at a stretch, 1972 or 1893.”

Lucy stares at him again. “How did you – ”

“Because that’s where it’s started to split.” He considers her, weighing his words. “In the middle. I destroyed the Mothership, as you said I could. It turns out that this was a bad idea on both our parts. It reset it to the timeline where none of this had technically happened, but it built in so much paradox that it’s starting to happen anyway. The changes we made are bursting back into existence randomly, like cluster bombs. We can’t be sure when or where they’ll hit – or who. And if you care about your sister, you’re going to help me find a way to stop it.”

Lucy’s spine stiffens. “If you’re threatening Amy – ”

“I’m not threatening her!” Flynn looks completely exasperated. “I’m warning you that in the new existence, the one that came about as the result of our meddling, she was gone! She was never born, and my wife and daughter were dead! You already said that Lorena vanished. It could be that she’s already just. . . gone, and there’s no getting her back.” A muscle works in his cheek. He does look genuinely frantic. “If the timeline remembered that she was supposed to be dead – don’t you see? Your sister could be the next to go! Just like that.”

Lucy is thoroughly rattled. She likewise should have a logical answer for this, but she doesn’t. “But my. . .” she says at last, faintly. “My sister exists. She’s a person, she’s real, she’s here. How can she just. . . not?”

“I don’t know.” Flynn stares at the ceiling, bleak and drained. “But it happened before. She was gone. And the only thing you wanted was to get her back, the same way I wanted nothing more than to save my wife and child. If you wait until she’s gone again this time, it’ll be too late.”

Lucy has absolutely nothing to say to that. So this is what he wants: for them to join forces to stop their respective loved ones from vanishing in a puff of unsustainable spatial-temporal paradox, thanks to changes to history that they themselves made with the aid of a time machine. _Cracked,_ of course, does not begin to cover it. And it would be difficult enough if they were ordinary people. Wanted fugitives from God knows how many federal agencies, with the added complication of whoever he thinks these Rittenhouse people are. . . Lucy can’t think of any feasible way to pull it off. As well, she’s a historian, not a quantum physicist. She can advise on the general facts of the past, but for putting up the hood and tinkering with the engine. . . yeah, she’s lost on that. There’s still no scrap of proof for his story, either, and she represses the academic’s urge to ask for it, for a citation, for empirical, verifiable evidence. She’s scrawled it on her students’ papers all the time. _Show me where the text supports this argument._

They remain staring at each other for an excruciating moment longer. She again has to concede that she doesn’t know why he would make this up. It does look like her handwriting in the photocopy, and everything he’s known about the unreality of her reality. . . that nagging feeling that something is out of place, that things are out of order and memories can’t be counted on. It does exactly match the version she got from Lorena, about what Flynn told her, so if he _is_ a delusional liar, at least he’s a consistent one. Agent Christopher did use the word “unprecedented” when talking about whatever he wants to do.

What the hell.

Lucy remains irresolute a split second more. Then at last, she looks at him straight. “Fine,” she says quietly. “What do we do?”

Given Flynn’s apparent predilection for kidnapping and grand theft larceny, she shouldn’t be too surprised that the answer involves this, and it also doesn’t, to her ears, sound like much of a plan. He says that one of the rules of time travel (cool, Lucy thinks, good to know there are rules) is that you can’t travel on your own timeline, go back to anywhere you’ve already been, so you have to be indirect about changing things. Can’t just pop back five minutes before and get a do-over on that bad day or anything else. He’s confident, however, that a scientist of sufficient genius, if given a sufficient incentive, could create a one-time loophole to circumvent this. All he needs to do is reverse the decision to destroy the Mothership, so reality is allowed to proceed more or less as it was, with the possibility for the changes to exist harmoniously with the new timeline. That way, they still have their loved ones, but they don’t put so much stress on the space-time continuum that it threatens to snap at any moment and erase them. Everyone wins.

“Really?” Lucy repeats skeptically. “Which scientist?”

“Rufus.” Flynn looks at her as if it’s surprising she needs to ask.

“And what? How do we get him?”

“I grab him, of course!”

“What? No!” Lucy glares at him. “I did not agree to help you hurt people!”

“I wouldn’t hurt him. Just borrow him until he figures it out.”

“Your kind of borrowing is known as kidnapping!” Lucy puts her hands on her hips. “After you caused enough of a mess fiddling around with reality and the Mothership and putting strain on the timeline, as well as kidnapping people, your solution is to – put _more_ strain on the timeline and kidnap _more_ people? No!”

“You agreed to help me, Lucy.” His voice is low, almost a growl. “Help me.”

“Not like this.” Lucy regards him defiantly. “Think of a better plan.”

Flynn is inordinately frustrated by this principled stance, wheeling away with a curse. “It’s going to be dangerous enough if we bring the Mothership back. Or – ”

“Or what?” Lucy flashes back. “You’ll steal it again?”

Flynn looks as if he is very much regretting buying her dinner earlier. Good. She hopes he’s regretting a whole lot. “I am,” he says after a moment, clearly doing his best to keep his voice level, “trying to think of something that will do what we need to, as efficiently as possible. There’s still the Lifeboat, even if it doesn’t currently work. Get Rufus to create enough of a loophole for us to use it to reverse the decision to destroy the Mothership. This time we’ll just blow its controls and CPU, so it’s useless, rather than eradicate it entirely. Nobody even has to die this time. I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Nobody has to die this time?” Lucy repeats. “As opposed to what, all the other times?”

Flynn waves a hand impatiently. “Nobody anyone would miss.”

“I’m not sure you get to make that call.”

“What, and you do?” He paces to the window, peers out, and pulls his gun from his jacket, checking that it’s loaded, which is not the most comforting action for a still-probably-crazy man holding you technically captive to undertake. Even if Lucy doesn’t think he’ll use it on her, that doesn’t rule it out on anyone who might try to interrupt. Someone has to be looking for her. You’d hope so, at least. That after all the fuss and furor and the fact that Flynn snatched her when she was supposed to be the reason they snatched _him,_ there has to be some beating of feet involved to get her back. The question, though, is whether she’s going to let them.

Lucy can’t believe she’s actually, genuinely thinking about helping Flynn, but it’s clear enough that something is going on, Lorena did vanish, and she’d rather not take chances. She thinks wryly that it might be far easier for her to suggest non-murdery alternatives if she knew for a fact that this was actually real and not just his extensive fantasy, but still.

“Tell me,” he says after a moment. “Aren’t you a little bit curious?”

“About what?”

“The past.” His teeth flash in a sardonic grin. “Being there. Seeing it.”

“By the sounds of things, I didn’t have much time to sightsee,” Lucy says coolly. “Not if you were acting like this.”

Flynn absorbs that with an obnoxiously unruffled shrug. It’s true that they seem to have fallen into a kind of familiarity, almost without meaning to, if she’s prodding him about things they’ve done which she can’t, strictly speaking, remember. She returns to the bed and finishes her dinner, which has been somewhat interrupted by all this revelation, and has a moment to wonder if they’re planning to stay here tonight. Flynn isn’t the sort of person who’s going to stay long in one place, with a mission in mind and a manhunt on his tail, and they’ll probably try to sneak out once he’s sure it’s full dark and they’re not being observed. Lucy should likely try to get a few winks while she can, as she hasn’t slept since the plane ride to Dubrovnik and she’s starting to see double with exhaustion. She crawls onto the bed, curling up on her side. World in danger of ending or not, she needs a damn nap.

As she closes her eyes, she catches the quickest glimpse of a strange expression on Flynn’s face, as if it’s caught him off guard that she trusts him at least enough to fall asleep in his presence, to think that he won’t hurt her or otherwise let her come to harm. If she’s wrong, she’s wrong, but so be it. Later.

Lucy must indeed sleep, because she’s jerked out of a strange dream some interminable time later. It’s very dark. Flynn is sitting on the floor next to the bed, which can’t be very comfortable, drowsing with a hand inside his jacket – or at least he was. Whatever has roused her has caught his attention as well, and he gets stealthily to his feet, pulling his gun. Crosses the floorboards without a creak, waiting by the door, as there is another faint thump on the stairs outside. A click, and a clunk. The handle moves quietly. Someone’s trying to get in.

Lucy goes tense, drawing her legs up and tempted to dive behind the bed in case gunfire breaks out, as the latch works and saws back and forth. Flynn remains tense as a diver on the edge of the high board, waiting, _waiting._ Then the lock gives, the door opens, and he pounces like a jaguar.

There’s a muffled yell, a crash, the sound of something – it doesn’t take an expert to guess that it’s a gun – flying out of someone’s hand, and the further sound of a silent and furious struggle, grunting and huffing and swearing, as Flynn tackles someone on the landing outside. There is the distinct noise of fists hitting flesh, struggling bodies, a thump, a bang, and general semi-silent pandemonium as they roll inside the room, still whaling on each other. Then Lucy jumps up, dives for the light switch, and lays hold of it just in time to discover Flynn busily engaging in beating the daylights out of someone. Someone who is, impossibly, familiar.

The name bursts to her lips before she can stop it.

_“Wyatt?”_

He twists his head sharply to stare at her, which isn’t a good idea, as Flynn promptly punches it while he’s distracted. He flails back, landing a glancing blow, as Lucy pulls Flynn off and there are several further moments of general confusion until the chaos subsides. Wyatt sits up spitting blood and swearing, seems inclined to reach for his gun, and in the interests of preventing a full-blown firefight from breaking out, Lucy jumps in the middle. “What are you – ” Yes, he was the one who rescued her from the goons the other night, but he’s also supposed to be the one – of two, at any rate – who was her time-traveling teammate. “What are you _doing_ here?”

“Rescuing you.” Wyatt wipes his mouth and grimaces. “Though this wasn’t what I was expecting.”

“Yes,” Flynn growls. “I know what you were expecting.”

“You.” Wyatt regards him coldly. “They definitely got the dick part right.”

“Lucy’s fine. You can toddle along. Typical. Always interfering even when you can’t remember.” Flynn is no slacker in the baleful-stare department himself. “Or is it that you – ”

Wyatt completely ignores him. “You all right, ma’ – Lucy?”

She considers for a long moment. She’s not about to stay blindly beholden to Flynn on his insane crusade, but she isn’t going to abandon him flat-out either, and if the story’s true, Wyatt was her ally – her friend. Whatever both of them are supposed to remember, he doesn’t, and before any decisions are made in haste, he should at least be aware of what’s at stake.

She pauses, then reaches for the photocopied pages, ignoring Flynn’s hiss of disapproval. If these belong to some mythical journal she was supposed to have written once upon a time, she gets to decide who sees them, and this feels instinctively right in a way she can’t define or explain, to do this. With that, as Wyatt is still looking utterly baffled, she holds them out to him.

“Here,” she says quietly. “I think there’s something you should know.”


	6. Chapter 6

“You know,” Wyatt says grumpily, trying to shift to get some slack in the ropes. “If you actually wanted to convince me that you were onto – _whatever_ you think you’re onto, I’m still not sure – there were way better opening moves than attacking me in the dark, making me look at some journal supposedly claiming that we’re time travelers who may have inadvertently destroyed the world but don’t remember each other, and tying me to a chair. Just, you know. Throwing that out there for consideration.”

“And your point is?” Flynn remains unmoved. “You’d have contacted your friends back at Homeland Security if I hadn’t. I can’t have you doing that, Wyatt.”

His prisoner glares at him. “Excuse me? Did I miss the part where we’re on first-name terms? That’s _Sergeant Logan_ to you.”

“Oh, yes. How foolish of me to forget. When you’ve been overpowered, taken into custody, and otherwise sent it – what’s your term, FUBAR? – the most important thing is that I address you by your rank. I’ll keep that in mind.”

There is an evil silence as both men stare each other down. It’s a little past dawn, and Lucy has been allowed to venture cautiously to the café around the corner in search of food (Flynn taking advantage of her absence to force Wyatt into his present confinement, as he has a feeling that she would have objected if she was around). Her picture could be on the news by now, in which case someone might recognize her and call the cops, but Flynn is counting (unwisely, perhaps, but what else can he do?) on the fact that it won’t be. After all, the last thing Rittenhouse wants is a lot of attention on the case, missing posters printed up, questions asked, investigations opened. As far as they’re concerned, they’ve already handled the problem by sending Sergeant Logan here to get her back with minimum  fuss or mess. Then are likely to clap them both into indefinite detainment in some black site, intensively debrief them about what they do or do not remember, extort them for information, blackmail them into compliance, and whatever other nefarious schemes they have in mind. Flynn is doing the pair of them a considerable favor by keeping them away from that. It is not his fault that they don’t appreciate it. As fucking usual.

“Lucy,” Wyatt says after a moment. “What do you want with her?”

Flynn tips a shoulder in half a shrug. “Why do you ask?”

“Because the version of events I got was that I needed to rescue her from some crazy criminal mastermind who probably had her chained in a dungeon. The crazy and criminal parts were clearly accurate. But, well.” Wyatt hesitates. It must be apparent to even his keenly penetrating butter knife of a mind that this is not a typical kidnapper/hostage situation. “As far as I can tell, you really think you need her. Or something from her.”

Flynn shrugs again. “It’s there in the journal. She decided you should read it.”

“I meant the non-insane version.”

“There is no other version.” Flynn regards the younger man coolly. “You don’t remember, but you didn’t like me much before either – ”

“Wow, really? Shocking.”

Flynn grits his teeth, but elects to ignore that. “Still. By the end of things, we had. . . I won’t be so optimistic as to call it an understanding, but it was something. I’m not trying to make you understand for the dubious pleasure of your company alone, Wyatt. I need your help.”

Something flickers in Wyatt’s blue eyes at that, but it’s hard to say what. “You have a funny way of asking for it.”

Flynn makes an impatient gesture. “You think I don’t know how ludicrous this sounds? Don’t you think I wish there was another, simpler, _ordinary_ explanation? I’m well aware I’d have to literally pound it into your head. But if you don’t believe me, at least believe Lucy. I have a feeling that’s easier for you.”

Wyatt has been about to say something else, but at that, he abruptly goes quiet. At last he says, “You didn’t hurt her, did you? To. . . convince her, or whatever?”

Flynn mulls a smart remark, such as the answer he gave this same man in ’54 to this same question, but if the only point of agreement they have is Lucy, the only chance he has of getting through to him, that might not be the wisest course of action. _Yes, and you’ve always been so concerned with that before, Garcia._ Finally he says, “No. I won’t say I was a saint about it, or anything, but I didn’t hurt her.”

Wyatt glances at him sidelong, still not trusting him but clearly wanting to believe him for whatever inexplicable reason – well, inexplicable only to him, as Flynn knows full well why. The silence stretches on again, less combative and more contemplative, until the door scrapes open and Lucy steps through, attractively flushed and windswept, clutching a bakery bag. At the sight of them, she stops short and frowns. _“Why_ is he tied to a chair?”

“Good question,” Wyatt says. “I’m with her.”

“We had to talk,” Flynn says stubbornly. Decides it would probably be counterproductive to remind them of Washington 1972, as that is where this happened before, though they might be starting to remember. “Without him trying to do something stupid. This seemed easiest.”

“Look, if I don’t check in with HQ soon, they’re going to get suspicious. This was supposed to be a fairly routine mission anyway, hostage extraction and recovery, and if I don’t – ”

“Why did they send you by yourself?” Flynn interrupts. “Normally it would be a whole squadron of you Delta Force dicks, wouldn’t it? Sending a single operative has to be dramatically against policy. Didn’t you have the least suspicion that they might be setting you up?”

Wyatt once more starts to say something, then stops. The best he can come up with is, “Paris is a modern city, not a war zone. If it’s something that can be handled by one plainclothes agent, instead of a whole conspicuous strike team in body armor, there’s plenty of reason and precedent to run it solo. And as I said. I do have backup, and I can contact them.”

“I wouldn’t,” Flynn says lightly. “If I were you.”

“Let me guess.” Wyatt rolls his eyes. “You were the kid who did not play nice with others in school.”

“That’s beside the point!” Flynn stands up abruptly, barely remembering to duck so that he doesn’t thump his head on the side of the garret roof. “Are you going to help me or not?”

“Considering that this is my negotiating position, do you really think I can make an actual decision? That you’d just whisk me in here, explain your cracked ideas, and I’d shrug and say, ‘sounds legit, let’s get started?’ I need to get Lucy home before something happens to her, whether or not you mean it! You’re a wanted terrorist. They have half the security agencies of the entire federal government looking for you, probably more! What are you going to do, let her catch a few bullets for you? Jesus Christ! Have you thought this through at _all?”_

Despite himself, Flynn flinches. He knows that his methods have been, to say the least, morally questionable and strategically slapdash, but he has had to think on his feet the entire time, and he is certainly not about to let _Wyatt Logan_ throw a spanner in the works now. He turns away, rubbing his chin, until he’s further startled by the feeling of a hand on his arm. Lucy’s hand, in fact. “Garcia,” she says in an undertone. “He’s right.”

It’s Flynn’s turn to be at a loss for words. He can feel Wyatt watching them, plainly sensing that this is likewise an unusual exchange for a captor and a captive, where Lucy evidently thinks that she can talk him around to her way of doing things. She is not entirely wrong, as it of course happened before with rather unsettling ease, in that cellar in Washington D.C., but they’ll never know if her plan to destroy Rittenhouse would have actually worked, because he was the one to pull the rug out from it. Accidentally, but still. It occurs to Flynn that they could pay another visit to Ethan Cahill and see if he still has those files, or anything else useful he forgot last time, but he knows that he won’t. After all, they were never there in 1954, so Cahill never met them, never was convinced to lead a double life as the mole within the operation and compile evidence on their crimes. Even if he did, Rittenhouse would be well prepared for another attack on that front. They clearly remember what happened, or at least some of them do. Must have safeguards built in somehow, ways to make sure they track changes to reality, from the moment they commissioned a time machine and decided to start meddling around with the fabric of the cosmos. Probably moved to protect all the members arrested in the previous timeline, change details and erase charges and manufacture new identities, just in case.

For a moment, Flynn feels utterly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task, the fluid and amorphous and indestructible nature of this enemy – lop off one head, a hundred more grow in its place. He’s almost unspeakably exhausted. Couldn’t Wyatt and Lucy just have let him blow them all up, instead of being irritatingly self-righteous about the whole thing? Murder, however dubious its morality, is undoubtedly effective. They’d be dead too – he’d be dead – but right now, that doesn’t seem to matter very much. It’s not like he’s doing a damn lot of good.

And yet, he thinks, before he can stop himself. If he had, Lucy would be dead too. And somehow, despite everyone he’s killed (who, he supposes, he now _hasn’t_ killed – but that doesn’t feel like vindication or atonement), that seems like the one that could never be forgiven. He asked God for absolution. If he stood for divine judgment with that on his conscience, he would not receive it, and he would fully deserve that. He’d be done for. Damned.

_What if He led you to me?_

Flynn grimaces again, trying to chase out the memory of how his heart turned over when she said that, how it was nearly exactly a blinding light from the heavens. He kept asking for a sign, a miracle – what else did he want than a strange woman appearing who somehow knew him, claiming she was from the future, giving him a journal, and telling him about a time machine? He’d thought that was the answer, the guidance: use it, kill them, take vengeance. And of course, he was completely wrong. Lucy was the gift, the sign, the miracle. She was right before him the whole time, and he’s never even known until it’s too late.

Her hand is still on his arm. His gaze flickers down to her. He wants to tell her that, remind her that she said it, but then, he’s always tried _telling_ Lucy things, and he’s still not sure if it ever worked. She seems slightly more inclined to believe him this time, even without her memories, but he doesn’t know if that’s anything to do with him, or just her innate sense of things being _off,_ that unerring intuition that she can’t quite shut off no matter how hard she tries. He’s forgotten that she has to _learn_ it all, that she can’t just skip from A to C without going through the process of B. Theoretically, he supposes, that means being patient with her. Possibly even trying, once more, to do things her way. But that always takes longer, and he does not know – ironically, as it has always been the one thing uniting them, its twists and turns and tears, its possibility and impossibility alike – if they have enough time.

Flynn tries to get hold of himself, to banish the heat and unsteadiness in his stomach. He wishes that Lucy wasn’t looking up at him like that, with that imploring intensity and unconscious belief. Lorena already thought that he ran off to have a torrid affair with her, and it is far closer to the mark than Flynn ever wants to admit – emotionally, at least, if not physically. If he’s wondering if God did in fact lead him to a woman who is not his wife, if there have been moments late at night when he has conjured the ghost of her to keep him company – telling himself it is only so he does not tarnish Lorena’s memory with this sordid quest – then there’s no way to be entirely safe about this. Lorena isn’t a memory anymore, but she _is_ missing. If that is Flynn’s fault, for even remotely thinking he might have feelings for someone else, he’ll be the one to kill her this time. Not Rittenhouse. He can’t. He _can’t._

He pulls away from Lucy, harder than he means to. “No,” he says harshly. “Wyatt helps us, or I put a bullet in his head.”

Both of them stare at him with coldly apparent distaste. Lucy steps back from him with a jerk, as if she was deluding herself to think that she ever had a chance of appealing to his better nature, and Flynn informs Wyatt that he will now make a call and tell his bosses back in the States that everything is fine and he has the situation under control, that he has Lucy safe but needs a few extra days to sort everything out. “And,” he adds. “I know all the code words that mean you’re being held hostage and need them to send a strike team in. Use any of them, and. . .” He cocks his gun with a pointed thunk. “Get the picture?”

Wyatt continues to stare at him loathingly. It’s unclear if he’s all that fussed about threats directed toward him, and Flynn supposes that the more effective maneuver might be to aim it at Lucy instead, but the thought of pointing a gun at her, even by accident, gives him slight heart failure – he still remembers what it felt like to look up and see her on the other end in 1780, standing between him and John Rittenhouse. Besides, he’s just told Wyatt that he didn’t hurt her, and he can’t quite stand to prove that a lie now, just like everything else. He keeps the gun where it is, and tosses Wyatt’s phone at him with the other hand. “Call.”

With the bonds having been loosed just enough to allow Wyatt to do this, he hesitates a final moment, looks between Lucy – who is white-faced and clearly silently pleading with him to cooperate and not be hurt, that they’ll think of another way out later – and Flynn, and then grudgingly does as ordered. With the muzzle of Flynn’s gun trained on him, he makes a brief call back to base. Says exactly what Flynn told him to, and nothing else. The people on the other end seem to buy it, and he hangs up with a further black look. “There, asshole. Now what?”

“We need to find some way to contact Rufus Carlin.” That would be far easier than trying to smuggle a wanted terrorist, a missing college professor, and a Delta Force soldier through U.S. customs and border patrol one more time – Flynn is good, but not _that_ good. Get in touch with Carlin on some pretext. Tell him he’s won a prestigious science award, something like that. Get him to fly out here, join them, and find somewhere with comparable capabilities to Mason Industries. The only place Flynn can think of is the CERN facilities in Geneva, Switzerland, home of the Large Hadron Collider, the cutting edge of experimental particle physics. How they will get in _there,_ well, Flynn isn’t to that part of the plan yet. But if there is anywhere in the world that can fix a broken timestream, it’s that, and Rufus will probably love the chance to play around with it. If he doesn’t hold too much of a grudge for being effectively deceived and kidnapped and coerced into it, that is, but Flynn doesn’t think that is terribly important.

“Right,”  Wyatt says coldly. “Because he’s the other one of the Time-Traveling Three Musketeers? I don’t even know what you want with him.”

“That’s for the best.” Flynn is tired of arguing with these people, explaining himself, trying to make them understand. He calculates in his head. It’s only a bit over five hours to drive from Paris to Geneva, and they’re still in the Schengen area, so they should not be asked for any ID crossing the border. The flight is shorter, but they’d have to present passports, so that’s out. He can definitely get his hands on a car, legitimately or otherwise, so the biggest problem would be controlling Wyatt between here and there (he is welcome to ride in the trunk, if he feels like causing more trouble). And if there are any police blockades set up on the outskirts of the city, looking for certain escaped suspects, that could be dicey. If worse comes to worse, though, Flynn will deal with it. How he intends to do this is probably predictable.

It takes further wrangling, threatening, and general bare-knuckles diplomacy, but the three of them finally pack up and depart their impromptu lodgings. With Flynn promising to make Wyatt very much regret it if he tries an escape, they march down the stairs and out into the alley. There is a flower delivery van parked nearby, which Flynn considers, before deciding that it is a bit too whimsical for this particular mission, and besides, the business would definitely have a GPS tracker or something in it, report it missing quickly. Instead, he angles for an inconspicuous, beat-up Renault, the kind of thing that its owner might be secretly relieved to have stolen, use the insurance money to buy themselves a decent new ride. Wyatt is forced into the back seat, while Lucy pauses, clearly considers getting in with him as an act of solidarity, then decides on the passenger seat so she can keep a better eye on Flynn. She sits with precision, hands folded in her lap, and he can feel her anger cold in the air around her. He deserves it. Richly, in fact.

He gets behind the wheel, takes out his picks, and manages to gun the car to life, pulling out and turning around. He checks the gas tank – a little over half full, that will at least get them some of the way, though they’ll probably have to stop at some point. Keeps an eye on Wyatt in the rearview mirror; his hands are still tied, but if he decides to do something rash, ambush Flynn while he’s driving, it will be bad. Flynn, however, thinks that Wyatt won’t risk crashing the car with Lucy in it, and in fact is going to have to count on that. Well, then. This should be a fun family road trip for everyone.

It’s still early, and while there seem to be a few more cops out than usual, nobody notices them. Flynn keeps to a normal speed despite his instinct to floor it and clear out of here as fast as possible, eyes flicking back and forth in case flashing lights start swarming up from any direction. He turns on the radio, trying to see if there’s any news of traffic backup or police checkpoints on any of the ring roads, but the hosts seem to be too busy complaining that Sarkozy actually threatened to return to politics the other day. It’s south on the A6 as far as Mâcon, then a short jaunt east on the A40, across the Swiss border and into Geneva. Assuming nothing stupid happens, they could be there in time for a late lunch.

They make it out of Paris without incident, though the silence in the car is almost physically oppressive. Lucy passes the bakery bag back to Wyatt, who fishes a croissant out awkwardly. Flynn is hungry too, but he has a feeling that he is going to have to suck it up and suffer. He has an absurd urge to make conversation, do something to pass the time, but that is clearly going to get him nowhere. He concentrates on the road instead. One day when they remember, they’ll thank him for this. Or be twice as determined to arrest him, who knows.

It’s a fairly uncomplicated drive to Mâcon, where they have to stop for gas. This is tricky, as a restroom break is also in order, and Flynn doesn’t want to let Lucy and Wyatt too far out of his sight. As they pull into the service station, he warns, “I’ll let you get out, but talk to anyone or tell them who you are, and – ”

“Right. You’ll shoot them.” Wyatt gives him a black look. “Or otherwise do something to hurt them for being in the way. Don’t worry, we’ll mind our manners. For now.”

This is not the most encouraging utterance in the world, but Flynn has to take what he can get. He removes Wyatt’s bonds and allows them out, then fills up the tank, keeping an eagle eye on them as they go inside. Wyatt can’t speak French, so his options for blowing their cover are more limited, but Lucy does. Flynn obviously does not want to shoot up a gas station full of innocent people, as that would provide a giant flashing beacon for their location among other drawbacks, and besides, he’s starting to run low on ammunition. He has a few more clips to spare, but he wants to save it for Rittenhouse, not this. If they try to call his bluff, he’ll have to think of some way to get around it, but that’s the thing about them. They’re good people. They’re not going to risk hurting bystanders, even if their own necks are on the line. The opposite, in fact, of him.

At any rate, Wyatt and Lucy both return to the car without incident, though their expressions speak volumes about how they feel in doing so. Flynn reminds himself that the older couple in the campervan one pump over were probably not, in fact, looking at them too long, and pulls out. As they merge onto the A40, Wyatt finally speaks. “So. What the hell are we doing in Switzerland? Trying to rob one of their banks? Major cuckoo clock heist?”

“No.” Flynn has to hit the brakes as someone cuts him off, growls a curse, and decides that while he _could_ shoot this miserable villain, he won’t. How magnanimous of him. “I told you, we’re trying to fix the broken timeline. That’s why we need Rufus, and CERN.”

“Right,” Wyatt says. “Because this definitely looks like saving the world.”

“I don’t care if you believe me or not.” Flynn cares, of course he cares, he cares so much that it twists his guts in knots – that he should give any proportion of a shit of what Wyatt Logan, Master Sergeant, remotely thinks about him, but he does. “Maybe you can occupy yourself usefully, and read the journal, eh? I’m not going to explain everything to you twice.”

Wyatt shifts his weight angrily, making Flynn wonder if it was a mistake not to tie his hands again. “Jesus, you’re such a dick.”

“Never said I wasn’t.” Flynn raises an eyebrow. “But I’m not lying.”

Wyatt shoots a glance at Lucy, as if to judge if there’s any chance she’s actually buying any of the mounds of bullshit Flynn is shoveling on them faster than they can possibly dig out. “Okay,” he says after a moment, tersely. “Let’s presume for argument’s sake that you actually are trying to do the right thing. Why are you doing it like this?”

“Because I have to!” Flynn hits the wheel in frustration. “The only other people in the world who can remotely help me are _you_ three, and the government is crawling with Rittenhouse, who want all of us dead! Maybe not you, Lucy, given that your father is so important to them, but – ”

Lucy goes stiff. “What are you talking about? My father’s dead. Henry Wallace, he died almost ten years ago. Lung cancer, the same as. . .” Her voice cracks, ever so slightly, but she recovers. “Same as is happening to Mom.”

“No.” Flynn could, he supposes, do this more tactfully, but he can’t help the urge to throw stones at her glass house, to see if anything at all cracks and breaks through, makes her remember, does anything. “Your father’s name is Benjamin Cahill. He is a high-ranking member of the secret society I told you about, Rittenhouse. Wallace never was your father. Your mother lied to you.”

 _“I beg your pardon?”_ Lucy stares at him, white to the lips. “Why on _earth_ would you say something like that?”

“Why would I make it up?” Flynn hopes she won’t start crying, even if Lucy is not, at least usually, a crier. Then he would want to pull over and comfort her, and that would be no good at all. “You knew it, or you used to. The same as you, Wyatt, used to know who killed your wife.”

That, to say the least, gets a reaction. Wyatt snaps forward so fast he might give himself whiplash. “What the _fuck_ are you talking about?”

“I told you the name of Jessica’s murderer, just as I promised. Not that it’s going to do you any good now. You and Rufus stole the Lifeboat to make sure he was never born, but it didn’t bring her back.” Flynn changes lanes, thinking it might be wise to be near the shoulder if Wyatt makes a lunge at him. “How do I know that, huh?”

“Do you think this is funny?” Wyatt stares at him with a look of such sheer hatred that Flynn, for a moment, almost recoils. “Stabbing us both in our weakest spots like this? For what, sadistic pleasure? Is that what you want? To hurt us just for the fun of it?”

“I want you both to know the truth.” Flynn isn’t sure what part of that was unclear, but trust Wyatt to miss the point. “Ugly as it is. Do you want to remember? Do you want to know what I’m talking about when I say all this? Then why don’t you try?”

“Try what?” Wyatt explodes. “To concentrate hard enough to join you in your sick little delusions? You know, I get it. I do. You’re a fucking psychopath.”

“No, I’m not!” It’s Flynn’s turn to roar back, as he jerks the car over onto the shoulder and puts on his flashers, as he doesn’t feel up to driving and having this argument at the same time. “I’m not! I’m trying to help you! Help you both! Now go on, if you don’t care about any of this, about what I’m saying, about her. Here’s your chance. Get out of the car right now. Walk away, Wyatt, if that’s what you want, what you believe. I’m not going to stop you.”

“Except with what?” Wyatt sneers. “A .45 caliber to the back of the head?”

Flynn whirls around, holds up his gun, and clicks the magazine out of it, letting Wyatt see that it’s unloaded. “There. Unless you think I could throw it at you hard enough to kill you. Go on. Hitchhike back to Paris, fly back to San Francisco and your empty, unfulfilled life, if that’s what you want. Far be it from me to stop you.”

Wyatt’s eyes blaze back at him, and for a moment Flynn wonders if they are going to have to take this outside, literally. Then, choking on his umbrage, Wyatt says, “No. I’m not going to leave Lucy here with you.”

“And why not? Why is that? Why do you keep having to convince yourself that you don’t know her, that she’s just the woman you were sent to rescue? What is it about her that’s keeping you here? If it’s nothing – go.  You keep insisting it’s nonsense. Prove it.”

There is another, even more hideous silence. Then Wyatt says, “I hate you.”

“So the usual, then?” Seeing that he does not appear to be getting out of the car (unfortunate, really) Flynn pulls back into traffic and accelerates. “Let me know if you change your mind. I won’t be sad to get rid of you.”

Wyatt mutters something probably unrepeatable under his breath, but they make it to the Swiss border without further incident, though the air in the car could probably light a cigarette on its own. As Flynn hoped, they cross without being examined too closely, and drive down into Geneva, beautiful with its glimmering blue namesake lake and distant snowcapped mountains. It’s midafternoon, and Flynn wants to find somewhere to set up base – he considers one of the omnipresent bed and breakfasts, but decides that they will probably be safer in one of the big hotels downtown, where there is a constant traffic of foreigners and tourists and no special attention will be paid to them, which they might get at a smaller establishment. He parks the Renault in a side street and leaves it there, supposing he’s lucky that they didn’t break down on the autobahn, and takes Lucy’s arm by reflex, which she permits (though not without a chilly look warning him that all has not been forgiven). With Wyatt trailing sullenly a few paces behind, they walk into the bustling financial district, and Flynn picks a hotel near the Gare de Cornavin. Not bank-breakingly expensive, as he’s not made of money, but he also does not intend to stay in a total dive, and he keeps a lookout as they walk into the glittering glass lobby. He has a credit card and passport under a false name, the one he used to get out of America, but if they’ve picked up on that alibi, this could turn unpleasant quickly.

As usual, however, Homeland Security is not nearly as smart as they think they are, and Flynn manages to book a standard suite with two bedrooms, as he does not intend to let his hostages/grudging co-conspirators/whatever they are come and go entirely without supervision. He doesn’t _think_ they’re going to leave at this stage, but he’s also not going to make a foolish mistake and blow everything to hell, and as he can feel the clerk’s eyes on them, perhaps sensing that there is not exactly an air of harmony and amicability about these three harried travelers, he says to Lucy, “Looking forward to our sightseeing, honey?”

Lucy starts, but a faint smile touches her lips almost despite herself, which she can’t quite bite away before Flynn sees it. He doesn’t know who the clerk thinks Wyatt is, in that case, and doesn’t particularly care. He accepts the key cards, says apologetically, “We had a stressful trip,” takes Lucy’s arm again, and strides off across the floor to the elevators. They ride up to the suite and swipe inside, as Flynn shuts the door, deadbolts it, and makes an only slightly sardonic gesture. “Probably want to freshen up, don’t you?”

“How thoughtful,” Wyatt mutters, clearly sensing that this is a thinly veiled pretext to get them out of the way while Flynn does who-the-fuck -knows-what, but also just as clearly feeling the effects of their eventful past few days. He hesitates a final moment, then goes into the bathroom and shuts the door. Once they hear the water start to run, Flynn heads for the phone.

“What are you going to do?” Lucy asks, catching him off guard. “With Rufus Carlin?”

“I’m going to convince him to travel here.” Flynn is an accomplished liar, as it comes with the territory working in intelligence and having to concoct cover stories and plausible explanations at the drop of a hat, and he is confident of his ability to get Rufus’ butt on a plane, if nothing else. Especially if he pays for the ticket and sends him something on official-looking email letterhead. “After that, it’s up to him if he wants to make it easy or difficult.”

“Why don’t you just _not_ be such a. . .” Lucy searches for a word to encompass the full extent of his character flaws, and finds nothing sufficient for the job. “If you really want to do the right thing, why do you keep going about it the wrong way?”

“Who says it’s wrong?” But it’s a feeble deflection, as Flynn can’t quite meet her eyes as he says it. “You can thank me – or criticize me – later.”

“I think kidnapping, extortion, threats of gross bodily harm, and the at least strongly implied possibility of murder might fall under that heading,” Lucy says levelly. “Not even to mention whatever you think you were doing with claiming my dad isn’t my dad, and that you know who killed his wife, or – ” She stops, rubbing her eyes. Quieter, she says, “Is that what you want, like he thinks? To hurt us?”

Flynn can take all the sneering accusations Wyatt wants to dish out, but this stings in a way he wasn’t prepared for. He looks up at her, almost wounded that this is what she thinks of him, though he has to grimly admit that he has given her more than good reason for it. “No,” he says. “That’s not what I want.”

Lucy studies his face with a searching expression, until he almost wants to turn away from the intensity of that regard, knowing too well what she is seeing. At last, she sucks in a little breath, wets her lips, and nods once, as if making a decision that she hopes she doesn’t regret. He senses that she won’t stop him from calling Rufus, but she’ll keep a close eye on whatever he does afterward, and doesn’t know whether to appreciate this interference or not. The air is charged between them the same way it was in the car, but differently this time, until Flynn is aware of a decided difficulty in catching his breath. No. This is absolutely not happening. He forbids it.

Still. It’s too hard to tear his eyes off hers, to reach for the phone, to get himself under control as he prepares his lie. He’ll have to go down to the hotel business center to buy the plane ticket and send the email, and Wyatt and Lucy might run then, but if they don’t want to know the truth, fine. To hell with them. He’ll do this alone. He’s used to that.

Flynn sits down and picks up the phone. Dials, and waits. Can feel Lucy watching him for a moment longer, until she finally turns as well, and goes.

* * *

Rufus spends most of the overnight plane ride scribbling equations on the back of the tiny napkin they gave him with his equally fun-size pack of crackers and wondering if this would be a good time to bring up his theory that the world might be ending. He runs out of room on the napkin fairly quickly, so he has to express his genius on the barf bag instead, and then when he has covered both sides of that in complicated squiggles (watched quizzically by his seatmate, who is clearly hoping that he is not planning a hijacking – Rufus heard the story of the professor detained for doing math on a plane, which some panicky white person mistook for Arabic) the SkyMall catalogue. He’s not sure he’s really worked anything out, and he doesn’t give himself much more than a pounding headache. But when Dr. Asher Thompkins calls from the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as _Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire_ or CERN, the largest particle physics lab in the world and Geek Valhalla for someone of Rufus’s interests, says they’ve taken notice of his outstanding work at Mason Industries and have an urgent issue for him to consult on, you kind of just pick up and go.

Idly, Rufus hopes Jiya will be impressed by this, as he didn’t exactly get a chance to tell her before he left; Dr. Thompkins sent him a fully paid plane ticket for a departure that evening, San Francisco to Geneva, connecting through Frankfurt, and an email on CERN letterhead with the address of the downtown hotel where he is supposed to meet them. It briefly crosses Rufus’ mind to wonder why they don’t want to meet him at the lab, but there are probably interview formalities and access issues and whatever else to work out before they let him stroll into the middle of their secured research facility.  He’s brought a portfolio of his major projects from Mason Industries, so they know he’s not fresh off the turnip cart, including his schematics for the Lifeboat and his questions about the paradox of the Mothership’s apparent simultaneous use/non-use prior to its destruction. Also, of course, the space-time continuum’s notably fragile state. Maybe they’ve picked up the same thing on their observations, and are assembling a nerd squad to run intervention before it gets any worse. Rufus wouldn’t exactly mind. Saving the world could definitely get him laid. Not, of course, that his interest is entirely so ignoble.

Rufus dozes on and off until they land in Frankfurt, and he has just about enough time to grab a coffee and donut and type out a casual email to Jiya on the airport wifi, before boarding his flight to Geneva. He did inform Connor Mason that he had to take a quick trip, but for some reason, didn’t tell him exactly where he was going. Rufus isn’t even sure why, and the more he’s searched for a reason, the more he hasn’t found one. He just didn’t want to, and he can’t explain it more than that. Connor has enough on his plate with Agent Neville and the rest of his minions swarming the lab, and every time Rufus considered it, it felt – well, wrong. He did fill him in on the disturbing implications of the Mothership data, and Mason promised that it would be forwarded to the appropriate higher-ups, but this. . . he can’t, for some reason. Rufus doesn’t know. It’s dumb. Hopefully he’ll come back with an answer, and it will all be moot.

He is yawning and jetlagged by the time he lands in Geneva sometime the next morning, hoping that Dr. Thompkins will be prompt about the initial meeting, and he can crash and recover before he’s expected to be smart. He gets the high-speed train from Cointrin International into downtown, looking around interestedly; he hasn’t really had the chance to do much traveling, and this is only the second time he’s been out of the country – the first was the London international science competition that he won in high school, the one Connor sponsored him in. Something about that briefly catches at him, but he ignores it.

Rufus gets off at the central train station, navigates through the commuter crowds, double-checks the address, and crosses to the hotel across the street. He thinks this is the one, and wonders if he should switch his comfortable sweats, the clothes he wore for a long-haul international flight, for something a bit more respectable. Dr. Thompkins is not expecting a disheveled bumpkin, after all. His voice on the phone sounded almost familiar, though Rufus doesn’t know why – European accent of some kind, not surprising, considering that he works here. Maybe they’ve crossed paths at some conference or event.

Rufus ducks into the hotel bathroom, pulls a pair of clean jeans and a smart jacket out of his suitcase, changes, washes his face, pops a breath mint, and decides that he looks more or less respectable. He heads into the lobby and glances around for anyone who might be an eminent scientist, trying to anticipate what kind of questions he’ll be asked. Nothing he can’t handle, but it would be nice to have had some time to prepare. He doesn’t want to screw this up. Or –

“Mr. Carlin?”

Rufus turns around eagerly, ready to science their faces off, to prove what a worthy choice he was, to earn Cool Boyfriend cred, to do whatever –

And freezes.

He recognizes the tall, dark, sharp-dressed man striding toward him, from the briefing session with the bigwigs at Mason Industries. The name that he blurted out and didn’t know how he knew it, until he suddenly realizes what is going on here, what has actually been happening all along, and feels a freezing wave crash over his head. The smart thing to do would be to run for it, but Rufus’s feet remain rooted to the ground. Until the man reaches him, holds out one hand for a friendly shake, and with the other, presses a gun to his side, warning him not to do exactly that.

“Good morning, Rufus,” Garcia Flynn says. “Please, come with me.”


End file.
